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THE KAS1DAH 

OF 

HAjf ABDU EL-YEZD1 




THE SUNBURNT POET 

R. F. B. 

(Trieste, Oct. 20, 1890.) 

To win the Theban pri^e each brought his ode, 
When, lo ! a stranger stood, wind-flusht and brown, 
Who sang the wondrous world and claimed the crown ; 
But high gods sing in a forgotten mode. 
Then cried he, soaring high — his bright feet shod 
With Day that quenched the day and hid the town — 
" Ye spurn Apollo as a sunburnt clown, 
Ye pallid priestlings of a sunburnt god!" 

' T was Phoebus' self And now he welcomes thee, 
England's brave Burton, dowered of sun and wind, 

Whose songs were bom in deserts fierce and free, 
'Mid dusky Bedouins, Mongols yellow-skinned, 

In Amazonian woods, in wilds of Ind, 

And on the breast of Camoens' mother-sea. 

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON. 




/£ la^<5) /I /2i^C^ 



THE KASIDAH OP HAJ1 

ABDU EL-YEZDi 
TRANSLATED AND ANNO- 
TATED BT HIS FRIEND 
AND PUPIL. F.B. 




g L 



Portland, Maine 
YHOMJIS S. MOSHES^ 

Mdccccxx 



#1 



This Eleventh Edition 
on Van Gelder paper con- 
sists of 1500 copies. 









COPYRIGHT 

THOMAS B. MOSHER 

j8g6 







CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword vii 

Elegy by A. C. Swinburne . . xi 

The KasIdah i 

To the Reader .... 2 

Notes 65 

Bibliography 121 







jCUS. 



*l\ 



s\ 



i Prefixed to the title-pages of the 1880, 1894, and 
1900 quarto editions of The Kasidab. The meaning of 
this Arabic inscription is : Abdii Hdjl Al-Kasidab, or, 
The Lay of the Higher Law by Abdu the Traveller. 




FOREWORD 



He was a man born with thy face and throat, 

Lyric Apollo I 
Long he lived nameless : how should spring take note 

Winter would follow ? 
Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone ! 

Cramped and diminished, 
Moaned be, ' ' New measures, other feet anon 1 

My dance is finished ? " 
No, that '5 the world's way. 

Lofty designs must close in like effects : 

Loftily lying, 
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects, 

Living and dying. 

ROBERT BROWNING. 

4 i /~\ n the return journey from Meccah. when 
V_y Richard Burton could secure any pri- 
vacy, he composed . . . The Kasidah, or The 
Lay of the Higher Law, by Haji Abdu El- 
Yezdi, which was one of his eastern noms-de- 
plume. In his little foreword to the reader, 
the better to disguise his authorship, he calls 
himself the Translator, and signs 'F. B.,' or 
Frank Baker, . . . from Francis, his second 
name, and Baker his mother's family name. 
It was written twenty-seven years before he 



FOREWORD 

ventured to print it. It reminds one, more 
than any other poem, of the Rubaiyat of 
Omar Khayyam . . . made known by Mr. 
Edward FitzGerald in 1861, at one and the 
same time to Richard Burton, to Swinburne, 
and to Dante Rossetti. Richard Burton at 
once claimed him as a brother- Sufi, and 
said that all his allusions were purely typi- 
cal, and particularly in the second verse: — 

'Before the phantom of False morning died, 
Methought a Voice within the Tavern cried, 
"When all the Temple is prepared within, 
Why nods the drowsy Worshipper outside ?" ' 

Yet The Kasidah was written in 1853 — the 
Rubaiyat he did not know till eight years 
later." 

Such is the account given by Lady Isabel 
Burton in her preface to the quarto of 1894 
of the origin of a poem first printed in 1880, 
which no judicious critic can fail to regard 
as a genuine contribution to English litera- 
ture. The seal and superscription of its 
author are impressed on every line; it is 
infused with a nobility and breadth of 
thought characteristic of the Man. One 
cannot but regret that there is no record of 
what estimate, if any, Burton placed upon 
his magnum opus. Fortunately Lady Burton 
had no control over the text, and The Kasidah 
therefore remains as it was written. 



FOREWORD 

Whether anything of moment was derived 
from Burton's knowledge of FitzGerald's 
magnificent redaction need cause no long 
debate. Beyond a remarkable parallelism 
in the opening stanzas of the two poems, of 
conscious borrowing no trace exists. Not 
even Omar could materially modify the lan- 
guage or shape the argument of a mind 
saturated with an Orientalism so occult 
and profound. Both drew from one great 
fountain head; yet The Kasidah remains 
alone, — a giant monolith upreared beneath 
the hoary stars upon the eternal Plain of 
Ages. i 

Sir Richard Francis Burton was born March 
19, 1821, and died at Trieste, October 20, 
1890. The equal in daring of Raleigh and 
of Drake, the peer of all adventurous souls 
since a new world was given Castile and 
Leon, his name is writ large in the annals 



1 I acknowledge and I wish to record ray obligation. 
The Kasldab was first known to me through reading 
Mr. Justin Huntly McCarthy's exquisite Introduction 
to his Prose Omar issued in an edition of 550 copies 
by The Chiswick Press, London, 1889. I reprinted 
this book entire in my Bibelot Series in 1896, each 
quartain numbered and the entire text in Italic 8-point 
old-style type. Both these editions are rarities to-day, 
but my regard for Mr. McCarthy's version and the 
beauty of our attempts at bookmaking are with me 
still. 



FOREWORD 

of the race. In that elegy which we now 
reprint entire, unrivalled as it is for fiery- 
hearted rapture of friendship, Algernon 
Charles Swinburne has rendered homage to 
the greatest Oriental scholar dead, whom 
England ever knew and neglected. Gather- 
ing himself in his singing robes the greatest 
poet then living finally dismissed with superb 
valediction the Man who had come to the 
uttermost Limit of Lands. 

There may be higher praise than this, — 
there may be more resplendent poetry, — 
but if such exist I know not where to find 
them. 

THOMAS BIRD MOSHER. 





ELEGY 



1869-1891 



Auvergne, Auvergne, O wild and woful land, 
O glorious land and gracious, white as gleam 
The stairs of heaven, black as a flameless brand, 
Strange even as life, and stranger than a dream. 



Could earth remember man, whose eyes made bright 
The splendour of her beauty, lit by day 

Or soothed and softened and redeemed by night, 
Wouldst thou not know what light has passed away? 



Wouldst thou not know whom England, whom the world, 
Mourns? For the world whose wildest ways he trod, 

And smiled their dangers down that coiled and curled 
Against him, knows him now less man than god. 



Our demigod of daring, keenest-eyed 

To read and deepest read in earth's dim things, 
A spirit now whose body of death has died 

And left it mightier yet in eyes and wings, 



The sovereign seeker of the world, who now 

Hath sought what world the light of death may show, 

Hailed once with me the crowns that load thy brow, 
Crags dark as midnight, columns bright as snow. 

Thy steep small Siena, splendid and content 
As shines the mightier city's Tuscan pride 

Which here its face reflects in radiance, pent 
By narrower bounds from towering side to side, 

Set fast between the ridged and foamless waves 
Of earth more fierce and fluctuant than the sea, 

The fearless town of towers that hails and braves 
The heights that gird, the sun that brands Le Puy ; 

The huddled churches clinging on the cliffs 

As birds alighting might for storm's sake cling, 

Moored to the rocks as tempest-harried skiffs 
To perilous refuge from the loud wind's wing; 

The stairs on stairs that wind and change and climb 
Even up to the utmost crag's edge curved and curled, 

More bright than vision, more than faith sublime, 
Strange as the light and darkness of the world; 

Strange as are night and morning, stars and sun, 
And washed from west and east by day's deep tide, 

Shine yet less fair, when all their heights are won, 
Than sundawn shows thy pillared mountain-side. 

Even so the dawn of death, whose light makes dim 
The starry fires that life sees rise and set, 

Shows higher than here he shone before us him 
Whom faith forgets not, nor shall fame forget. 



Even so those else unfooted heights we clomb 

Through scudding mist and eddying whirls of cloud, 

Blind as a pilot beaten blind with foam, 

And shrouded as a corpse with storm's grey shroud, 

Foot following foot along the sheer straight ledge 
Where space was none to bear the wild goat's feet 

Till blind we sat on the outer footless edge 

Where darkling death seemed fain to share the seat, 

The abyss before us, viewless even as time's, 
The abyss to left of us, the abyss to right, 

Bid thought now dream how high the freed soul climbs 
That death sets free from change of day and night. 

The might of raging mist and wind whose wrath 
Shut from our eyes the narrowing rock we trod, 

The wondrous world it darkened, made our path 
Like theirs who take the shadow of death for God. 

Yet eastward, veiled in vapour white as snow, 

The grim black herbless heights that scorn the sun 

And mock the face of morning rose to show 

The work of earth-born fire and earthquake done. 

And half the world was haggard night, wherein 
We strove our blind way through: but far above 

Was light that watched the wild mists whirl and spin, 
And far beneath a land worth light and love. 

Deep down the Valley of the Curse, undaunted 

By shadow and whisper of winds with sins for wings 

Andghosts of crime wherethrough the heights live haunted 
By present sense of past and monstrous things, 



The glimmering water holds its gracious way 

Full forth, and keeps one happier hand's-breadth green 

Of all that storm-scathed world whereon the sway 
Sits dark as death of deadlier things unseen. 

But on the soundless and the viewless river 

That bears through night perchance again to day 

The dead whom death and twin-born fame deliver 
From life that dies, and time's inveterate sway, 

No shadow save of falsehood and of fear 

That brands the future with the past, and bids 

The spirit wither and the soul grow sere, 
Hovers or hangs to cloud life's opening lids, 

If life have eyes to lift again and see, 

Beyond the bounds of sensual sight or breath, 

What life incognisable of ours may be 

That turns our light to darkness deep as death. 

Priests and the soulless serfs of priests may swarm 

With vulturous acclamation, loud in lies, 
About his dust while yet his dust is warm 

Who mocked as sunlight mocks their base blind eyes, 

Their godless ghost of godhead, false and foul 
As fear his dam or hell his throne : but we, 

Scarce hearing, heed no carrion church-wolf's howl: 
The corpse be theirs to mock; the soul is free. 

Free as ere yet its earthly day was done 

It lived above the coil about us curled: 
A soul whose eyes were keener than the sun, 

A soul whose wings were wider than the world. 



We, sons of east and west, ringed round with dreams, 
Bound fast with visions, girt about with fears, 

Live, trust, and think by chance, while shadow seems 
Light, and the wind that wrecks a hand that steers. 

He, whose full soul held east and west in poise, 

Weighed man with man, and creed of man's with creed, 

And age with age, their triumphs and their toys, 
And found what faith may read not and may read. 

Scorn deep and strong as death and life, that lit 
With fire the smile at lies and dreams outworn 

Wherewith he smote them, showed sublime in it 
The splendour and the steadfastness of scorn. 

What loftier heaven, what lordlier air, what space 

Illimitable, insuperable, infinite, 
Now to that strong-winged soul yields ampler place 

Than passing darkness yields to passing light, 

No dream, no faith can tell us : hope and fear, 

Whose tongues were loud of old as children's, now 

From babbling fall to silence : change is here, 
And death ; dark furrows drawn by time's dark plough. 

Still sunward here on earth its flight was bent, 
Even since the man within the child began 

To yearn and kindle with superb intent 
And trust in time to magnify the man. 

Still toward the old garden of the Sun, whose fruit 

The honey-heavy lips of Sophocles 
Desired and sang, wherein the unwithering root 

Sprang of all growths that thought brings forth and sees 



Incarnate, bright with bloom or dense with leaf 
Far-shadowing, deep as depth of dawn or night: 

And all were parcel of the garnered sheaf 
His strenuous spirit bound and stored aright. 

And eastward now, and ever toward the dawn, 
If death's deep veil by life's bright hand be rent, 

We see, as through the shadow of death withdrawn, 
The imperious soul's indomitable ascent. 

But not the soul whose labor knew not end — 

But not the swordman's hand, the crested head — 

The royal heart we mourn, the faultless friend, 
Burton — a name that lives till fame be dead. 

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 



11^ 





THE KASIDAH 




Let his page 
Which charms the chosen spirit of the age, 
Fold itself for a serener clime 
Of years to come, and find its recompense 
In that just expectation. 

SHELLEY. 



Let them laugh at me for speaking of things 
which they do not understand ; and I must pity 
them while they laugh at me. 

ST. AUGUSTINE. 



TO THE READER 

The Translator has ventured to entitle a 
"Lay of the Higher Law" the following 
Composition, which aims at being in advance 
of its time; and he has not feared the dan- 
ger of collision with such unpleasant forms 
as the "Higher Culture." The principles 
which justify the name are as follows: — 

The Author asserts that Happiness and 
Misery are equally divided and distributed 
in the world. 

He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard 
to others, the sole and sufficient object of 
human life. 

He suggests that the affections, the sym- 
pathies and the "divine gift of Pity" are 
man's highest enjoyments. 

He advocates suspension of judgment, 
with a proper suspicion of " Facts, the idlest 
of superstitions." 

Finally, although destructive to appear- 
ance, he is essentially reconstructive. 

For other details concerning the Poem 
and the Poet, the curious reader is referred 
to the end of the volume. 

F. B. 

Vienna, Nov., 1880. 




THE KASIDAH 



THE hour is nigh ; the waning Queen walks 
forth to rule the later night ; 
Crown'd with the sparkle of a Star, and 
throned on orb of ashen light: 



The Wolf-taili sweeps the paling East to 
leave a deeper gloom behind, 

And Dawn uprears her shining head, sighing 
with semblance of a wind : 



The highlands catch yon Orient gleam, while 
purpling still the lowlands lie; 

And pearly mists, the morning-pride, soar 
incense-like to greet the sky. 



The horses neigh, the camels groan, the 
torches gleam, the cressets flare; 

The town of canvas falls, and man with din 
and dint invadeth air: 



i The false dawn. 



THE KASlDAH 



The Golden Gates swing right and left; up 
springs the Sun with flamy brow; 

The dew-cloud melts in gush of light ; brown 
Earth is bathed in morning-glow. 



Slowly they wind athwart the wild, and while 
young Day his anthem swells, 

Sad falls upon my yearning ear the tinkling 
of the Camel-bells : 



O'er fiery waste and frozen wold, o'er horrid 

hill and gloomy glen, 
The home of grisly beast and Ghoul, 1 the 

haunts of wilder, grislier men ; — 

VIII 

With the brief gladness of the Palms, that 
tower and sway o'er seething plain, 

Fraught with the thoughts of rustling shade, 
and welling spring, and rushing rain ; 

IX 

With the short solace of the ridge, by gentle 

zephyrs played upon, 
Whose breezy head and bosky side front 

seas of cooly celadon; — 

i The Demon of the Desert. 



THE KASfDAH 



'T is theirs to pass with joy and hope, whose 

souls shall ever thrill and fill 
Dreams of the Birthplace and the Tomb, — 

visions of Allah's Holy Hill."' 



But we? Another shift of scene, another 

pang to rack the heart; 
Why meet we on the bridge of Time to 

'change one greeting and to part ? 

XII 

We meet to part; yet asks my sprite, Part 

we to meet ? Ah ! is it so ? 
Man's fancy- made Omniscience knows who 

made Omniscience nought can know. 

XIII 

Why must we meet, why must we part, why 
must we bear this yoke of MUST, 

Without our leave or askt or given, by tyrant 
Fate on victim thrust? 

XIV 

That Eve so gay, so bright, so glad, this 
Morn so dim, and sad, and grey ; 

Strange that life's Registrar should write 
this day a day, that day a day! 

i Arafat, near Mecca. 



THE KASlDAH 



XV 



Mine eyes, my brain, my heart, are sad, — 

sad is the very core of me ; 
All wearies, changes, passes, ends; alas! the 

Birthday's injury! 



Friends of my youth, a last adieu! haply 

some day we meet again ; 
Yet ne'er the selfsame men shall meet; the 

years shall make us other men: 

XVII 

The light of morn has grown to noon, has 
paled with eve, and now farewell! 

Go, vanish from my Life as dies the tinkling 
of the Camel's bell. 



II 



In these drear wastes of sea-born land, these 
wilds where none may dwell but He, 
What visionary Pasts revive, what process 
of the Years we see: 



Gazing beyond the thin blue line that rims 

the far horizon-ring, 
Our sadden'd sight why haunt these ghosts, 

whence do these spectral shadows spring? 



in 



What endless questions vex the thought, of 
Whence and Whither, When and How? 

What fond and foolish strife to read the 
Scripture writ on human brow; 



IV 



As stand we percht on point of Time, 

betwixt the two Eternities, 
Whose awful secrets gathering round with 

black profound oppress our eyes. 



THE KASfDAH 



" This gloomy night, these grisly waves, these 
winds and whirlpools loud and dread : 

What reck they of our wretched plight who 
Safety's shore so lightly tread?" 

VI 

Thus quoth the Bard of Love and Wine,i 
whose dream of Heaven ne'er could rise 

Beyond the brimming Kausar-cup and Houris 
with the white-black eyes; 

VII 

Ah me I my race of threescore years is short, 

but long enough to pall 
My sense with joyless joys as these, with 

Love and Houris, Wine and all. 



Another boasts he would divorce old barren 

Reason from his bed, 
And wed the Vine-maid in her stead; — fools 

who believe a word he said ! 2 



And '"Dust thou art to dust returning,' 
ne'er was spoke of human soul!" 

The Soofi cries, 't is well for him that hath 
such gift to ask its goal. 

1 Hafizof Shiraz. 

2 Omar-i- Khayyam, the tent-maker poet of Persia. 



THE KASfDAH 



"And this is all, for this we 're born to weep 

a little and to die!" 
So sings the shallow bard whose life still 

labours at the letter "I." 

XI 

" Ear never heard, Eye never saw the bliss of 

those who enter in 
My heavenly kingdom," Isa. said, who wailed 

our sorrows and our sin: 



Too much of words or yet too few! What 

to thy Godhead easier than 
One little glimpse of Paradise to ope the 

eyes and ears of man ? 

XIII 

" I am the Truth ! I am the Truth ! " we hear 

the God-drunk gnostic cry 
"The microcosm abides in ME; Eternal 

Allah 's nought but I!" 



Mansur 1 was wise, but wiser they who smote 

him with the hurled stones; 
And, though his blood a witness bore, no 

wisdom-might could mend his bones. 

i A famous Mystic stoned for blasphemy. 



THE KAStDAH 



" Eat, drink, and sport ; the rest of life 's not 
worth a fillip," quoth the King; 

Methinks the saying saith too much: the 
swine would say the selfsame thing I 



Two-footed beasts that browse through life, 
by Death to serve as soil design'd, 

Bow prone to Earth whereof they be, and 
there the proper pleasures find: 



But you of finer, nobler stuff, ye, whom to 

Higher leads the High, 
What binds your hearts in common bond 

with creatures of the stall and sty? 



"In certain hope of Life-to-come I journey 

through this shifting scene" 
The Zahidi snarls and saunters down his 

Vale of Tears with confident mien. 



Wiser than Amran's Son2 art thou, who 
ken'st'so well the world-to-be, 

The Future when the Past is not, the Present 
merest dreamery; 

i The " Philister " of " respectable " belief. 
2 Moses in the Koran. 



THE KASJDAH 



XX 



What know'st thou, man, of Life? and yet 
for ever twixt the womb, the grave, 

Thou pratest of the Coming Life, of Ileav'n 
and Hell thou fain must rave. 



The world is old and thou art young; the 
world is large and thou art small; 

Cease, atom of a moment's span, to hold 
thyself an All-in-All! 



Ill 



Fie, fie! you visionary things, ye motes 
that dance in sunny glow, 
Who base and build Eternities on briefest 
moment here below; 



Who pass through Life like caged birds, the 

captives of a despot will; 
Still wond 'ring How and When and Why, and 

Whence and Whither, wond'ring still; 



ill 

Still w r ond 'ring how the Marvel came because 
two coupling mammals chose 

To slake the thirst of fleshly love, and thus 
the "Immortal Being" rose; 



IV 



Wond'ring the Babe with staring eyes, per- 
force compel 'd from night to day, 

Gript in the giant grasp of Life like gale- 
borne dust or wind-wrung spray ; 



THE KASfDAH 



Who comes imbecile to the world 'mid double 

danger, groans, and tears; 
The toy, the sport, the waif and stray of 

passions, error, wrath and fears; 



Who knows not Whence he came nor Why, 
who kens not Whither bound and When, 

Yet such is Allah's choicest gift, the blessing 
dreamt by foolish men; 



Who step by step perforce returns to couth- 
less youth, wan, white and cold, 

Lisping again his broken words till all the 
tale be fully told: 

VIII 

Wond'ring the Babe with quenched orbs, an 
oldster bow'd by burthening years, 

How'scaped the skiff an hundredstorms; how 
'scaped the thread a thousand shears ; 



IX 



How coming to the Feast unbid, he found 

the gorgeous table spread 
With the fair-seeming Sodom-fruit, with 

stones that bear the shape of bread : 



*3 



THE KASfDAH 



How Life was nought but ray of sun that 
clove the darkness thick and blind, 

The ravings of the reckless storm, the 
shrieking of the rav'ening wind ; 

XI 

How lovely visions 'guiled his sleep, aye 
fading with the break of morn, 

Till every sweet became a sour, till every 
rose become a thorn ; 



Till dust and ashes met his eyes wherever 

turned their saddened gaze ; 
The wrecks of joys and hopes and loves, the 

rubbish of his wasted days ; 

XIII 

How every high heroic Thought that longed 

to breathe empyrean air, 
Failed of its feathers, fell to earth, and 

perisht of a sheer despair; 



How, dower'd with heritage of brain, whose 
might has split the solar ray, 

His rest is grossest coarsest earth, a crown 
of gold on brow of clay ; 



M 



THE KASfDAH 



This House whose frame be flesh and bone, 
mortar'd with blood and faced with skin, 

The home of sickness, dolours, age; unclean 
without, impure within: 

XVI 

Sans ray to cheer its inner gloom, the cham- 
bers haunted by the Ghost, 

Darkness his name, a cold dumb Shade 
stronger than all the heav'nly host. 



This tube, an enigmatic pipe, whose end was 

laid before begun, 
That lengthens, broadens, shrinks and breaks; 

— puzzle, machine, automaton; 



The first of Pots the Potter made by Chrysor- 

rhoas' blue-green wave; 1 
Methinks I see him smile to see what guerdon 

to the world he gave! 



How Life is dim, unreal, vain, like scenes 
that round the drunkard reel; 

How "Being" meaneth not to be; to see 
and hear, smell, taste and feel. 



i The Abana, River of Damascus. 

IS 



THE KASfDAH 



A drop in Ocean's boundless tide, unfathom'd 

waste of agony; 
Where millions live their horrid lives by 

making other millions die. 

XXI 

How with a heart that would through love, 

to Universal Love aspire, 
Man woos infernal chance to smite, as 

Min'arets draw the Thunder-fire. 



How Earth on Earth builds tow'er and wall, 
to crumble at a touch of Time ; 

How Earth on Earth from Shinar-plain the 
heights of Heaven fain would climb. 

XXIII 

How short this Life, how long withal; how 
false its weal, how true its woes, 

This fever-fit with paroxysms to mark its 
opening and its close. 

XXIV 

Ah ! gay the day with shine of sun, and bright 
the breeze, and blithe the throng 

Met on the River-bank to play, when I was 
young, when I was young: 



16 



THE KASlDAH 



Such general joy could never fade; and yet 

the chilling whisper came 
One face had paled, one form had failed ; had 

fled the bank, had swum the stream; 

XXVI 

Still revellers danced, and sang, and trod the 
hither bank of Time's deep tide, 

Still one by one they left and fared to the 
far misty thither side ; 



And now the last hath slipt away yon drear 

Death-desert to explore, 
And now one Pilgrim worn and lorn still 

lingers on the lonely shore. 

XXVIII 

Yes, Life in youth-tide standeth still; in 
Manhood streameth soft and slow; 

See, as it nears the 'abysmal goal how fleet 
the waters flash and flow! 



And Deaths are twain; the Deaths we see 
drop like the leaves in windy Fall; 

But ours, our own, are ruined worlds, a globe 
collapst, last end of all. 



«7 



THE KASIDAH 



XXX 



We live our lives with rogues and fools, 
dead and alive, alive and dead, 

We die 'twixt one who feels the pulse and 
one who frets and clouds the head: 



And, — oh, the Pity! — hardly conned the 

lesson comes its fatal term ; 
Fate bids us bundle up our books, and bear 

them bod'ily to the worm: 



Hardly we learn to wield the blade before 
the wrist grows stiff and old; 

Hardly we learn to ply the pen ere Thought 
and Fancy faint with cold : 

XXXIII 

Hardly we find the path of love, to sink the 

Self, forget the "I," 
When sad suspicion grips the heart, when 

Man, the Man begins to die : 

xxxiv 

Hardly we scale the wisdom-heights, and 
sight the Pisgah-scene around, 

And breathe the breath of heav'enly air, and 
hear the Spheres' harmonious sound; 



18 



THE KASIDAH 



When swift the Camel-rider spans the howl- 
ing waste, by Kismet sped, 

And of his Magic Wand a wave hurries the 
quick to join the dead. 1 



How sore the burden, strange the strife ; 

how full of splendour, wonder, fear; 
Life, atom of that Infinite Space that 

stretcheth, twixt the Here and There. 



How Thought is imp'otent to divine the 
secret which the gods defend, 

The Why of birth and life and death, that 
Isis-veil no hand may rend. 

XXXVIII 

Eternal Morrows make our Day; our Is is 

aye to be till when 
Night closes in; 't is all a dream, and yet we 

die,— and then and THEN? 



And still the weaver plies his loom, whose 
warp and woof is wretched Man 

Weaving th' unpattern'd dark design, so dark 
we doubt it owns a plan. 



Death in Arabia rides a Camel, not a pale horse. 



THE KAStDAH 



XL 



Dost not, O Maker, blush to hear, amid the 

storm of tears and blood, 
Man say Thy mercy made what is, and saw 

the made and said 't was good? 

XLI 

The marvel is that man can smile dreaming 
his ghostly ghastly dream; — 

Better the heedless atomy that buzzes in the 
morning beam ! 



Oh the dread pathos of our lives ! how durst 

thou, Allah, thus to play 
With Love, Affection, Friendship, all that 

shows the god in mortal clay? 

XLIII 

But ah! what 'vaileth man to mourn; shall 
tears bring forth w r hat smiles ne'er 
brought; 

Shall brooding breed a thought of joy? Ah 
hush the sigh, forget the thought ! 

XLIV 

Silence thine immemorial quest, contain thy 

nature's vain complaint 
None heeds, none cares for thee or thine; — 

like thee how many came and went? 



THE KASfDAH 



Cease, Man, to mourn, to weep, to wail; 

enjoy thy shining hour of sun; 
We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the 

dance less full of fun? 



IV 



What Truths hath gleaned that Sage 
consumed by many a moon that waxt 
and waned ? 
What Prophet-strain be his to sing? What 
hath his old Experience gained? 



There is no God, no man-made God; a 
bigger, stronger, crueller man ; 

Black phantom of our baby-fears, ere 
Thought, the life of Life, began. 



in 



Right quoth the Hindu Prince of old,* "An 

Ishwara for one I nill, 
Th' almighty everlasting Good who cannot 

'bate th' Eternal 111:" 



IV 



'Your gods may be, what shows they are?" 
Hear China's Perfect Sage declare^ 

'And being, what to us be they who dwell 
so darkly and so far?" 



Buddha. 
Confucius. 



THE KASfDAH 



"All matter hath a birth and death; 't is 
made, unmade and made anew; 

"We choose to call the Maker 'God:' — 
such is Zahid's owly view. 

VI 

"You changeful finite Creatures strain" 
(rejoins the Drawer of the Wine) * 

"The dizzy depths of Infinite Power to 
fathom with your foot of twine ; " 



"Poor idols of man's heart and head with 

the Divine Idea to blend; 
"To preach as 'Nature's Common Course,' 

what any hour may shift or end." 



u How shall the Shown pretend to ken aught 
of the Showman or the Show? 

" Why meanly bargain to believe, which only 
means thou ne'er canst know? 

IX 

"How may the passing Now contain the 
standing Now — Eternity? — 

"An endless is without a was, the be and 
never the to-be? 

i The Soofi or Gnostic opposed to the Zihid. 
23 



THE KASfDAH 



"Who made your Maker? If Self-made, 
why fare so far to fare the worse 

" Sufnceth not a world of worlds, a self-made 
chain of universe? 



"Grant an Idea, Primal Cause, the Causing 

Cause, why crave for more ? 
" Why strive its depth and breadth to mete, 

to trace its work, its aid to 'implore? 



"Unknown, Incomprehensible, whate'er you 

choose to call it, call; 
"But leave it vague as airy space, dark in 

its darkness mystical. 

XIII 

" Your childish fears would seek a Sire, by 

the non-human God defin'd, 
" What your five wits may wot ye weet ; 

what is you please to dub ' design'd ; ' 

XIV 

"You bring down Heav'en to vulgar Earth; 

your Maker like yourselves you make, 
"You quake to own a reign of Law, you 

pray the Law its laws to break; 



24 



THE KASfDAH 



XV 



"You pray, but hath your thought e'er weighed 
how empty vain the prayer must be, 

" That begs a boon already giv'en, or craves 
a change of Law to see ? 



" Say, Man, deep learned in the Scheme that 

orders mysteries sublime, 
" How came it this was Jesus, that was Judas 

from the birth of Time ? 

XVII 

"How I the tiger, thou the lamb; again the 

Secret, prithee, show 
"Who slew the slain, bowman or bolt or 

Fate that drave the man, the bow? 



"Man worships self: his God is Man; the 
struggling of the mortal mind 

" To form its model as 't would be, the perfect 
of itself to find. 

XIX 

"The God became sage, priest and scribe 
where Nilus' serpent made the vale; 

"A gloomy Brahm in glowing Ind, a neutral 
something cold and pale: 



THE KAStDAH 



"Amid the high Chaldean hills a moulder of 

the heavenly spheres; 
"On Guebre steppes the Timeless-God who 

governs by his dual peers : 



; In Hebrew tents the Lord that led His 
leprous slaves to fight and jar; 

Yahveh,i Adon or Elobim, the God that 
smites, the Man of War. 



" The lovely Gods of lib'ertine Greece, those 

fair and frail humanities 
" Whose homes o'erlook'd the Middle Sea, 

where all Earth's beauty cradled lies, 

XXIII 

"Ne'er left its blessed bounds, nor sought 
the barb'arous climes of barb'arous gods 

"Where Odin of the dreary North o'er hog 
and sickly mead-cup nods : 

XXIV 

"And when, at length, 'Great Pan is dead' 
uprose the loud and dol'orous cry 

"A glamour wither'd on the ground, a 
splendour faded in the sky. 

i Jehovah. 

26 



THE KASIDAH 



"Yea, Pan was dead, the Nazar'ene came 
and seized his seat beneath the sun, 

"The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one 
is three and three is one; 

XXVI 

"Whose sadd'ening creed of herited Sin 
spilt o'er the world its cold grey spell ; 

"In every vista showed a grave, and 'neath 
the grave the glare of Hell; 



" Till all Life's Po'esy sinks to prose ; romance 

to dull Real'ity fades; 
"Earth's flush of gladness pales in gloom 

and God again to man degrades. 



Then the lank Arab foul with sweat, the 

drainer of the camel's dug, 
Gorged with his leek-green lizard's meat, 

clad in his filthy rag and rug, 

XXIX 

Bore his fierce Allah o'er his sands and 

broke, like lava-burst upon 
The realms where reigned pre- Adamite 

Kings, where rose the Grand Kayanian 

throne.* 



r Kayani — of the race of Cyrus ; old Guebre heroes. 
27 



THE KASfDAH 



XXX 



Who now of ancient Kayomurs, of Zal or 

Rustam cares to sing, 
Whelmed by the tempest of the tribes that 

called the Camel-driver King? 



"Where are the crown of Kay Khusraw, 

the sceptre of Anushirwan 
"The .holy grail of high Jamshid, Afrasiyab's 

hall? — Canst tell me, man? 

XXXII 

"Gone, gone, where I and thou must go, 
borne by the winnowing wings of Death, 

" The Horror brooding over life, and nearer 
brought with every breath : 



" Their fame hath filled the Seven Climes, they 
rose and reigned, they fought and fell, 

" As swells and swoons across the wold the 
tinkling of the Camel's bell. 



28 



There is no Good, there is no Bad; 
these be the whims of mortal will: 
What works me weal that call I 'good,' 
what harms and hurts I hold as 'ill:' 



They change with place, they shift with 
race; and, in the veriest span of Time, 

Each Vice has worn a Virtue's crown ; all 
Good was banned as Sin or Crime: 



in 



Like ravelled skeins they cross and twine, 
while this with that connects and blends ; 

And only Khizr 1 his eye shall see where one 
begins, where other ends: 



IV 



What mortal shall consort with Khizr, when 

Musa turned in fear to flee? 
What man foresees the flow'er or fruit whom 

Fate compels to plant the tree? 



i Supposed to be the Prophet Elijah. 
2 9 



THE KASlDAH 



For Man's Free-will immortal Law, Anagke, 

Kismet, Des'tiny read 
That was, that is, that aye shall be, Star, 

Fortune, Fate, Urd, Norn or Need. 



'Man's nat'ural State is God's design;" 
such is the silly sage's theme; 

'Man's primal Age was Age of Gold;" 
such is the Poet's waking dream: 



Delusion, Ign'orance ! Long ere Man drew 
upon Earth his earli'est breath 

The world was one contin'uous scene of 
anguish, torture, prey and Death; 

VIII 

Where hideous Theria of the wild rended 

their fellows limb by limb ; 
Where horrid Saurians of the sea in waves 

of blood were wont to swim ! 



The "fair young Earth" was only fit to 
spawn her frightful monster-brood; 

Now fiery hot, now icy frore, now reeking 
wet with steamy flood. 



30 



THE KASfDAH 



Yon glorious Sun, the greater light, the 
"Bridegroom" of the royal Lyre, 

A flaming, boiling, bursting mine ; a grim 
black orb of whirling fire : 



XI 



That gentle Moon, the lesser light, the 
Lover's lamp, the Swain's delight, 

A ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse 
upon the road of night. 



XII 



What reckt he, say, of Good or 111 who in 

the hill-hole made his lair, 
The blood-fed rav'ening Beast of prey, 

wilder than wildest wolf or bear? 



How long in Man's pre-Ad'amite days to 
feed and swill, to sleep and breed, 

Were the brute-biped's only life, a perfect 
life sans Code or Creed? 

XIV 

His choicest garb a shaggy fell, his choicest 

tool a flake of stone; 
His best of orn'aments tattoo'd skin and 

holes to hang his bits of bone; 



3 1 



THE KASfDAH 



XV 



Who fought for female as for food when 
Mays awoke to warm desire; 

And such the Lust that grew to Love when 
Fancy lent a purer fire. 



Where then "Th' Eternal nature-law by God 

engraved on human heart?" 
Behold his simiad sconce and own the Thing 

could play no higher part. 

XVII 

Yet, as long ages rolled, he learnt from 
Beaver, Ape and Ant to build 

Shelter for sire and dam and brood, from 
blast and blaze that hurt and killed; 

XVIII 

And last came Fire; when scrap of stone 
cast on the flame that lit his den, 

Gave out the shining ore, and made the 
Lord of beasts a Lord of men. 

XIX 

The "moral sense," your Zahid-phrase, is 

but the gift of latest years; 
Conscience was born when man had shed 

his fur, his tail, his pointed ears. 



32 



THE KASfDAH 



What conscience has the murd'erous Moor, 
who slays his guest with felon blow, 

Save sorrow he can slay no more, what 
prick of pen'itence can he know ? 

XXI 

You cry the "Cruelty of Things" is myst'ery 
to your purblind eye, 

Which fixed upon a point in space the gen- 
eral project passes by: 



For see! the Mammoth went his ways, 
became a mem'ory and a name; 

While the half-reasoner with the handi 
survives his rank and place to claim. 

XXIII 

Earthquake and plague, storm, fight and fray, 
portents and curses man must deem 

Since he regards his self alone, nor cares to 
trace the scope, the scheme; 



The Quake that comes in eyelid's beat to 

ruin, level, 'gulf and kill, 
Builds up a world for better use, to general 

Good bends special 111: 

i The Elephant. 

33 



THE KASfDAH 



The dreadest sound man's ear can hear, the 
war and rush of stormy Wind 

Depures the stuff of human life, breeds 
health and strength for humankind: 

XXVI 

What call ye them or Goods or Ills, ill-goods, 

good-ills, a loss, a gain, 
When realms arise and falls a roof; a world 

is won, a man is slain ? 

XXVII 

And thus the race of Being runs, till haply in 

the time to be 
Earth shifts her pole and Mushtari-imen 

another falling star shall see: 



Shall see it fall and fade from sight, whence 
come, where gone no Thought can tell, — 

Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase the 
tinkling of the camel-bell! 



The Planet Jupiter. 



34 



VI 



ALL Faith is false, all Faith is true : Truth 
is the shattered mirror strown 
In myriad bits; while each believes his little 
bit the whole to own. 



What is the Truth? was askt of yore. Reply 

all object Truth is one 
As twain of halves aye makes a whole ; the 

moral Truth for all is none. 



in 



Yescantly-learned Zahids learn from Aflatim 

and Aristu,i 
While Truth is real like your good: th' 

Untrue, like ill, is real too; 



As palace mirror'd in the stream, as vapour 

mingled with the skies, 
So weaves the brain of mortal man the 

tangled web of Truth and Lies. 

i Plato and Aristotle. 

35 



THE KASfDAH 



What see we here? Forms, nothing more! 

Forms fill the brightest strongest eye, 
We know not substance; 'mid the shades 

shadows ourselves we live and die. 



"Faith mountains move" I hear: I see the 
practice of the world unheed 

The foolish vaunt, the blatant boast that 
serves our vanity to feed. 



"Faith stands unmoved;" and why? Be- 
cause man's silly fancies still remain, 

And will remain till wiser man the day-dreams 
of his youth disdain. 



"'T is blessed to believe;" you say: The 

saying may be true enow 
An it can add to Life a light: — only remains 

to show us how. 



IX 



E'en if I could I nould believe your tales 

and fables stale and trite, 
Irksome as twice-sung tune that tires the 

dulled ear of drowsy wight. 



36 



THE KASfDAH 



With God's foreknowledge man's free will I 
what monster-growth of human brain, 

What pow'ers of light shall ever pierce this 
puzzle dense with words inane ? 



XI 



Vainly the heart on Providence calls, such 

aid to seek were hardly wise 
For man must own the pitiless Law that 

sways the globe and sevenfold skies. 



XII 



" Be ye Good Boys, go seek for Heav'en, 
come pay the priest that holds the key ; " 

So spake, and speaks, and aye shall speak 
the last to enter Heaven, — he. 



Are these the words for men to hear? yet 
such the Church's general tongue, 

The horseleech-cry so strong so high her 
heav'enward Psalms and Hymns among. 

XIV 

What? Faith a merit and a claim, when 
with the brain 't is born and bred ? 

Go, fool, thy foolish way and dip in holy 
water buried dead! 



37 



THE KASfDAH 



XV 



Yet follow not th' unwisdom-path, cleave 
not to this and that disclaim ; 

Believe in all that man believes; here all 
and naught are both the same. 



But is it so? How may we know? Haply 

this Fate, this Law may be 
A word, a sound, a breath ; at most the 

Zahid's moonstruck theory. 



Yes Truth may be, but 't is not Here; man- 
kind must seek and find it There, 

But Where nor / nor you can tell, nor aught 
earth-mother ever bare. 

XVIII 

Enough to think that Truth can be: come 

sit we where the roses glow, 
Indeed he knows not how to know who 

knows not also how to 'unknow. 



38 



VII 



Man hath no Soul, a state of things, a 
no-thing still, a sound, a word 
Which so begets substantial thing that eye 
shall see what ear hath heard. 



Where was his Soul the savage beast which 

in primeval forests strayed, 
What shape had it, what dwelling-place 

what part in nature's plan it played ? 



ill 



This Soul to ree a riddle made]; who wants 

the vain duality? 
Is not myself enough for me? what need of 

"I" within an "I"? 



IV 



Words, words that gender things I The 
soul is a new-comer on the scene; 

Sufficeth not the breath of Life to work the 
matter-born machine? 



39 



THE KASfDAH 



We know the Gen'esis of the Soul; we trace 

the Soul to hour of birth; 
We mark its growth as grew mankind to 

boast himself sole Lord of Earth: 



The race of Be'ing from dawn of Life in an 

unbroken course was run; 
What men are pleased to call their Souls 

was in the hog and dog begun : 



Life is a ladder infinite-stepped, that hides 

its rungs from human eyes; 
Planted its foot in chaos-gloom, its head 

soars high above the skies : 

VIII 

No break the chain of Being bears : all 

things began in unity; 
And lie the links in regular line though 

haply none the sequence see. 



The Ghost, embodied natural Dread of 

dreary death and foul decay, 
Begat the Spirit, Soul and Shade with 

Hades' pale and wan array. 



40 



THE KASfDAH 



The Soul required a greater Soul, a Soul of 

Souls, to rule the host; 
Hence spirit-powers and hierarchies, all 

gendered by the savage Ghost. 

XI 

Not yours, ye Peoples of the Book, these 

fairy visions fair and fond, 
Got by the gods of Khemi-land 1 and faring 

far the seas beyond! 

XII 

"Th' immortal mind of mortal man!" we 
hear yon loud-lunged Zealot cry; 

Whose mind but means his sum of thought, 
an essence of atomic "I." 

XIII 

Thought is the work of brain and nerve, in 
small-skulled idiot poor and mean; 

In sickness sick, in sleep asleep, and dead 
when Death lets drop the scene. 



"Tush!" quoth the Zahid, "well we ken 
the teaching of the school abhorr'd 

"That maketh man automaton, mind a 
secretion, soul a word. 

i Egypt; Kam, Kem, Khem (hierogl.), in the Dem- 
otic Khemi. 



4' 



THE KASfDAH 
XV 



"Of molecules and protoplasm you matter- 
mongers prompt to prate; 

"Of jelly-speck, development and apes that 
grew to man's estate." 



Vain cavil ! all that is hath come either by 

Mir'acle or by Law; — 
Why waste on this your hate and fear, why 

waste on that your love and awe ? 



Why heap such hatred on a word, why 

"Prototype" to type assign, 
Why upon matter spirit mass? wants an 

appendix your design? 

XVIII 

Is not the highest honour his who from the 

worst hath drawn the best; 
May not your Maker make the world from 

matter, an it suit His hest? 

XIX 

Nay more, the sordider the stuff the cun- 

ninger the workman's hand: 
Cease, then, your own Almighty Power to 

bind, to bound, to understand. 



42 



THE KASfDAH 



XX 



"Reason and Instinct!" How we love to 
play with words that please our pride; 

Our noble race's mean descent by false 
forged titles seek to hide! 

XXI 

For "gift divine" I bid you read the better 

work of higher brain, 
From Instinct differing in degree as golden 

mine from leaden vein. 



Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic 

Laby'rinth's single clue: 
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what 

crosses it can ne'er be true. 



"Fools rush where Angels fear to tread!" 
Angels and Fools have equal claim 

To do what Nature bids them do, sans hope 
of praise, sans fear of blame ! 



43 



VIII 



There is no Heav'en, there is no Hell; 
these be the dreams of baby minds; 
Tools of the wily Fetisheer, to 'fright the 
fools his cunning blinds. 



Learn from the mighty Spi'rits of old to set 
thy foot on Heav'en and Hell; 

In Life to find thy hell and heav'en as thou 
abuse or use it well. 



ill 



So deemed the doughty Jew who dared by 

studied silence low to lay 
Orcus and Hades, lands of shades, the 

gloomy night of human day. 



IV 



Hard to the heart is final death : fain would 

an Ens not end in Nil; 
Love made the senti'ment kindly good: the 

Priest perverted all to ill. 



44 



THE KASfDAH 



While Reason sternly bids us die, Love 
longs for life beyond the grave: 

Our hearts, affections, hopes and fears for 
Life-to-be shall ever crave. 



Hence came the despot's darling dream, a 
Church to rule and sway the State; 

Hence sprang the train of countless griefs in 
priestly sway and rule innate. 



VII 



For future Life who dares reply? No 

witness at the bar have we; 
Save what the brother Potsherd tells, — old 

tales and novel jugglery. 



Who e'er return'd to teach the Truth, the 
things of Heaven and Hell to limn? 

And all we hear is only fit for grandam-talk 
and nursery-hymn. 



"Have mercy, man!" the Zahid cries, "of 

our best visions rob us not ! 
" Mankind a future life must have to balance 

life's unequal lot. 



45 



THE KAStDAH 



"Nay," quoth the Magian, "'t is not so; I 
draw my wine for one and all, 

A cup for this, a score for that, e'en as his 
measure 's great or small : 



XI 



"Who drinks one bowl hath scant delight; 

to poorest passion he was born; 
"Who drains the score must e'er expect to 

rue the headache of the mom." 



Safely he jogs along the way which 'Golden 

Mean' the sages call; 
Who scales the brow of frowning Alp must 

face full many a slip and fall. 



Here extremes meet, anointed Kings whose 

crowned heads uneasy lie, 
Whose cup of joy contains no more than 

tramps that on the dunghill die. 



To fate-doomed Sinner born and bred for 
dangling from the gallows-tree; 

To Saint who spends his holy days in 
rapt'urous hope his God to see; 



46 



THE KASfDAH 



XV 



To all that breathe our upper air the hands 

of Dest'iny ever deal, 
In fixed and equal parts, their shares of joy 

and sorrow, woe and weal. 



" How comes it, then, our span of days in 
hunting wealth and fame we spend 

"Why strive we (and all humans strive) for 
vain and visionary end?" 

XVII 

Reply; mankind obeys a law that bids him 

labour, struggle, strain; 
The Sage well knowing its unworth, the 

Fool a-dreaming foolish gain. 

XVIII 

And who, 'mid e'en the Fools, but feels that 

half the joy is in the race 
For wealth and fame and place, nor sighs 

when comes success to crown the chase? 

XIX 

Again: In Hind, Chin, Franguestan that 

accident of birth befell, 
Without our choice, our will, our voice : 

Faith is an accident as well. 



47 



THE KASfDAH 



What to the Hindu saith the Frank : " Denier 

of the Laws divine ! 
However godly-good thy Life, Hell is the 

home for thee and thine." 

XXI 

"Go strain the draught before 't is drunk, 
and learn that breathing every breath, 

" With every step, with every gest, some 
thing of life thou do'est to death." 

XXII 

Replies the Hindu: "Wend thy way for 
foul and foolish Mlenchhas fit; 

"Your Pariah-par'adise woo and win; at 
such dog-Heav'en I laugh and spit. 



"Cannibals of the Holy Cow! who make 
your rav'ening maws the grave 

"Of Things with self -same right to live; — 
what Fiend the filthy license gave?" 



What to the Moslem cries the Frank? "A 
polygamic Theist thou! 

"From an impostor- Prophet turn; thy stub- 
born head to Jesus bow." 



48 



THE KASfDAH 



XXV 



Rejoins the Moslem: "Allah's one tho' with 

four Moslemahs I wive, 
"One-wife-men ye and (damned race!) you 

split your God to Three and Five." 



The Buddhist to Confucians thus: "Like 
dogs ye live, like dogs ye die; 

"Content ye rest with wretched earth; God, 
Judgment, Hell ye fain defy." 



Retorts the Tartar: " Shall I lend mine olny 

ready-money 'now,' 
For vain usurious 'Then' like thine, avaunt, 

a triple idiot Thou ! " 



" With this poor life, with this mean world 
I fain complete what in me lies ; 

I strive to perfect this my me; my sole 
ambition 's to be wise." 

XXIX 

When doctors differ who decides amid the 

milliard-headed throng? 
Who save the madman dares to cry. "'T is 

I am right, you all are wrong?" 



49 



THE KASfDAH 



You all are right, you all are wrong," we 

hear the careless Soofi say, 
For each believes his glimm'ering lamp to 

be the gorgeous light of day." 



" Thy faith why false, my faith why true ? 

't is all the work of Thine and Mine, 
"The fond and foolish love of self that 

makes the Mine excel the Thine." 



Cease then to mumble rotten bones; and 
strive to clothe with flesh and blood 

The skel'eton; and to shape a Form that all 
shall hail as fair and good. 

XXXIII 

" For gen'erous youth," an Arab saith, 
" Jahim 's 1 the only genial state; 

"Give us the fire but not the shame with 
the sad, sorry blest to mate." 



And if your Heav'en and Hell be true, and 
Fate that forced me to be born 

Forced me to Heav'en or Hell — I go, and 
hold Fate's insolence in scorn. 

i Jehannum, Gehenna, Hell. 

So 



THE KASfDAH 



XXXV 



I want not this, I want not that, already sick 

of Me and Thee; 
And if we 're both transform'd and changed, 

what then becomes of Thee and Me? 



Enough to think such things may be : to say 

they are not or they are 
Were folly: leave them all to Fate, nor wage 

on shadows useless war. 



Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from 
none but self expect applause; 

He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes 
and keeps his self-made laws. 

XXXVIII 

All other Life is living Death, a world where 

none but Phantoms dwell, 
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling 

of the camel-bell. 



5i 



IX 



How then shall man so order life that 
when his tale of years is told, 
Like sated guest he wend his way; how 
shall his even tenour hold? 



Despite the Writ that stores the skull; 

despite the Table and the Pen ; r 
Maugre the Fate that plays us down, her 

board the world, her pieces men ? 



in 



How when the light and glow of life wax 
dim in thickly gath'ering gloom, 

Shall mortal scoff at sting of Death, shall 
scorn the victory of the Tomb? 

IV 

One way, two paths, one end the grave. 

This runs athwart the flow'ery plain, 
That breasts the bush, the steep, the crag, 

in sun and wind and snow and rain: 



i Emblems of Kismet, or Destiny. 

52 



THE KASfDAH 



Who treads the first must look adown, must 

deem his life an all in all; 
Must see no heights where man may rise, must 

sight no depths where man may fall. 

VI 

Allah in Adam form must view; adore the 

Maker in the made 
Content to bask in Maya's smile,* in joys of 

pain, in lights of shade. 

VII 

He breaks the Law, he burns the Book, he 
sends the Moolah back to school; 

Laughs at the beards of Saintly men; and 
dubs the Prophet dolt and fool, 

VIII 

Embraces Cypress' taper- waist ; cools feet on 

wavy breast of rill; 
Smiles in the Nargis' love-lorn eyes, and 

'joys the dance of Daffodil; 

IX 

Melts in the saffron light of Dawn to hear 

the moaning of the Dove; 
Delights in Sundown's purpling hues when 

Bulbul woos the Rose's love. 



i Illusion. 

53 



THE KAStDAH 



Finds mirth and joy in Jamshid-bowl; toys 
with the Daughter of the vine; 

And bids the beauteous cup-boysay, " Master 
I bring thee ruby wine!" 1 



Sips from the maiden's lips the dew; brushes 
the bloom from virgin brow: — 

Such is his fleshly bliss that strives the 
Maker through the Made to know. 

XII 

I 've tried them all, I find them all so same 
and tame, so drear, so dry; 

My gorge ariseth at the thought; I com- 
mune with myself and cry: — 

XIII 

Better the myriad toils and pains that make 

the man to manhood true, 
This be the rule that guideth life; these be 

the laws for me and you: 



With Ignor'ance wage eternal war, to know 

thy self for ever strain, 
Thine ignorance of thine ignorance 3s thy 

fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane; 

i That all the senses, even the ear may enjoy. 

54 



THE KASfDAH 



XV 



That blunts thy sense, and dulls thy taste; that 
deafs thine ears, and blinds thine eyes; 

Creates the thing that never was, the Thing 
that ever is defies. 

XVI 

The finite Atom infinite that forms thy 

circle's centre-dot, 
So full-sufficient for itself, for other selves 

existing not, 



Finds the world mighty as 't is small; yet 
must be fought the unequal fray; 

A myriad giants here ; and there a pinch of 
dust, a clod of clay. 



Yes! maugre all thy dreams of peace still 
must the fight unfair be fought ; 

Where thou mayst learn the noblest lore, 
to know that all we know is nought. 

XIX 

True to thy Nature, to Thy self, Fame and 

Disfame nor hope nor fear: 
Enough to thee the small still voice aye 

thund'ering in thine inner ear. 



55 



THE KASfDAH 



XX 



From self-approval seek applause : What ken 
not men thou kennest, thou! 

Spurn ev'ry idol others raise; Before thine 
own Ideal bow: 

XXI 

Be thine own Deus: Make self free, liberal 

as the circling air: 
Thy Thought to thee an Empire be; break 

every prison'ing lock and bar: 



Do thou the Ought to self aye owed; here 
all the duties meet and blend, 

In widest sense, withouten care of what 
began, for what shall end. 



Thus, as thou view the Phantom-forms 
which in the misty Past were thine, 

To be again the thing thou wast with honest 
pride thou may'st decline; 



And, glancing down the range of years, fear 

not thy future self to see; 
Resign'd to life, to death resign'd, as though 

the choice were nought to thee. 



56 



THE KASfDAH 



On Thought itself feed not thy thought; 

nor turn from Sun and Light to gaze, 
At darkling cloisters paved with tombs, 

where rot the bones of bygone days : 

XXVI 

"Eat not thy heart," the Sages said; "nor 
mourn the Past, the buried Past;" 

Do what thou dost, be strong, be brave; 
and, like the Star, nor rest nor haste. 

XXVII 

Pluck the old woman from thy breast: Be 
stout in woe, be stark in weal ; 

Do good for Good is good to do: Spurn 
bribe of Heav'en and threat of Hell, 



To seek the True, to glad the heart, such is 
of life the HIGHER LAW, 

Whose difference is the Man's degree, the 
Man of gold, the Man of straw. 

XXIX 

See not that something in Mankind that 
rouses hate or scorn or strife, 

Better the worm of Izrail * than Death that 
walks in form of life. 



i The Angel of Death. 

57 



THE KASfDAH 



XXX 



Survey thy kind as One whose wants in the 

great Human Whole unite ;i 
The Homo rising high from earth to seek 

the Heav'ens of Life-in-Light; 



XXXI 



And hold Humanity one man, whose univer- 
sal agony 

Still strains and strives to gain the goal 
where agonies shall cease to be. 



Believe in all things; none believe; judge 
not nor warp by "Facts" the thought; 

See clear, hear clear, tho' life may seem 
Maya and Mirage, Dream and Naught. 



Abjure the Why and seek the How: the 
God and gods enthroned on high, 

Are silent all, are silent still; nor hear thy 
voice, nor deign reply. 

xxxiv 

The Now, that indivis'ible point which studs 

the length of infinite line 
Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all, the 

puny all thou callest thine. 

i The "Great Man" of the Enochites and the 
Mormons. 



58 



THE KASlDAH 



XXXV 



Perchance the law some Giver hath : Let 
be! let be! what canst thou know? 

A myriad races came and went; this Sphinx 
hath seen them come and go. 

xxxvi 

Haply the Law that rules the world allows 

to man the widest range ; 
And haply Fate 's a Theist-word, subject to 

human chance and change. 

XXXVII 

This "I" may find a future Life, a nobler 

copy of our own, 
Where every riddle shall be ree'd, where 

every knowledge shall be known; 



Where 't will be man's to see the whole of 
what on Earth he sees in part ; 

Where change shall ne'er surcharge the 
thought ; nor hope defer'd shall hurt 
the heart. 



Butl — faded flow'er and fallen leaf no more 

shall deck the parent tree; 
And man once dropt by Tree of Life what 

hope of other life has he ? 



59 



THE KASfDAH 



XL 



The shatter'd bowl shall know repair; the 
riven lute shall sound once more; 

But who shall mend the clay of man, the 
stolen breath to man restore? 

XLI 

The shiver'd clock again shall strike; the 
broken reed shall pipe again : 

But we, we die, and Death is one, the doom 
of brutes, the doom of men. 

XLII 

Then, if Nirwana 1 round our life with 
nothingness, 't is haply best; 

Thy toils and troubles, want and woe at 
length have won their guerdon — Rest. 

XLIII 

Cease, Abdu, Cease ! Thy song is sung, nor 
think the gain the singer's prize; 

Till men hold Ignor'ance deadly sin, till man 
deserves his title "Wise: "2 

XLIV 

In Days to come, Days slow to dawn, when 
Wisdom deigns to dwell with men, 

These echoes of a voice long stilled haply 
shall wake responsive strain: 

1 Comparative annihilation. 

2 " Homo sapiens." 



60 



THE KASfDAH 



XLV 



Wend now thy way with brow serene, fear 
not thy humble tale to tell: — 

The whispers of the Desert-wind; the Tink- 
ling of the camel's-bell. 



tbv 





NOTES 




In the 1894 edition of The Kasidab, 
Lady Burton has a note of her own on 
Section vi, Couplet xtv : 

" I think he is alluding, though he has 
not expressed it, to the Marcionites' heresy 
of baptizing for the dead. The Marcionites 
were heretics who lived at Sinope, a. d. 
150. Marcian came to Rome and believed 
in principles similar to the Manichaeans. 
When a man died, one of the Marcionites 
sat on his coffin, and another asked him if 
he were willing to be baptized, and he 
answered, " Yes," upon which he was bap- 
tized. These heretics quoted Paul (1 Cor. 
xv, 29), " Else what shall they do which 
are baptized for the dead, if the dead do not 
rise at all? Why are they then baptized 
for the dead? " Dr. E. Berdoe says " that 
this line has no reference to the Marcionite 
heresy at all, but to Holy Baptism, wherein 
we are buried with Christ. The reference 
is manifestly to Romans vi, 4, ' Therefore 
we are buried with him by baptism into 
death,' and the following context." 




NOTES 

NOTE I 

HAjf ABDU, THE MAN 

HAjf abdu has been known to me for 
more years than I care to record. A 
native, it is believed, of Darabghird in the 
Yezd Province, he always preferred to style 
himself El-Hichmakani, afacetious " lackab " 
or surname, meaning " Of No-hall, Nowhere." 
He had travelled far and wide with his eyes 
open; as appears by his "couplets." To a 
natural facility, a knack of language-learning, 
he added a store of desultory various read- 
ing; scraps of Chinese and old Egyptian ; of 
Hebrew and Syriac ; of Sanskrit and Prakrit ; 
of Slav, especially Lithuanian; of Latin and 
Greek, including Romaic; of Berber, the 
Nubian dialect, and of Zend and Akkadian, 
besides Persian, his mother-tongue, and 
Arabic, the classic of the schools. > Nor was 
he ignorant of "the -ologies" and the 
triumphs of modern scientific discovery. 
Briefly, his memory was well-stored; and 
he had every talent save that of using his 
talents. 



65 



NOTES 

But no one thought that he "woo'd the 
Muse," to speak in the style of the last 
century. Even his intimates were ignorant 
of the fact that he had a skeleton in his 
cupboard, his Kasidah or distichs. He con- 
fided to me his secret when we last met in 
Western India — I am purposely vague in 
specifying the place. When so doing he 
held in hand the long and hoary honours of 
his chin with the points towards me, as if to 
say with the Island-King: 

There is a touch of Winter in my beard, 

A sign the Gods will guard me from imprudence. 

And yet the piercing eye, clear as an onyx, 
seemed to protest against the plea of age. 
The MS. was in the vilest "Shikastah" or 
running-hand; and, as I carried it off, the 
writer declined to take the trouble of copying 
out his cacograph. 

We, his old friends, had long addressed 
Haji Abdu by the sobriquet of Nabbiana 
( " our Prophet " ) ; and the reader will see 
that the Pilgrim has, or believes he has, a 
message to deliver. He evidently aspires 
to preach a Faith of his own; an Eastern 
Version of Humanitarianism blended with 
the sceptical or, as we now say, the scientific 
habit of mind. This religion, of which 
Fetishism, Hinduism and Heathendom ; 



66 



NOTES 

Judaeism, Christianity and Islamism are 
mere fractions, may, methinks, be accepted 
by the Philosopher: it worships with single- 
minded devotion the Holy Cause of Truth, 
of Truth for its own sake, not for the goods 
it may bring; and this belief is equally 
acceptable to honest ignorance, and to the 
highest attainments in nature-study. 

With Confucius the Haji cultivates what 
Strauss has called the "stern common-sense 
of mankind;" while the reign of order is a 
paragraph of his " Higher Law." He traces 
from its rudest beginnings the all but abso- 
lute universality of some perception by man, 
called "Faith;" that sensus Numinis which, 
by inheritance or communication, is now 
universal except in those who force them- 
selves to oppose it. And he evidently holds 
this general consent of mankind to be so 
far divine that it primarily discovered for 
itself, if it did not create, a divinity. He 
does not cry with the Christ of Novalis, 
"Children, you have no father;" and per- 
haps he would join Renan in exclaiming, 
Un monde sans Dieu est horrible ! 

But he recognises the incompatibility of 
the Infinite with the Definite; of a Being 
who loves, who thinks, who hates ; of an 
Adus purus who is called jealous, wrathful 
and revengeful, with an " Eternal that makes 



6? 



for righteousness." In the presence of the 
endless contradictions, which spring from the 
idea of a Personal Deity, with the Synthesis, 
the Be griff oi Providence, our Agnostic takes 
refuge in the sentiment of an unknown and 
an unknowable. He objects to the countless 
variety of forms assumed by the perception 
of a Causa Causans (a misnomer), and to 
that intellectual adoption of general propo- 
sitions, capable of distinct statement but 
incapable of proofs, which we term Belief. 

He looks with impartial eye upon the 
endless variety of systems, maintained with 
equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men 
of equal ability and honesty. He is weary 
of wandering over the world, and of finding 
every petty race wedded to its own opinions; 
claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all 
others to be in error, and raising disputes 
whose violence, acerbity and virulence are 
in inverse ratio to the importance of the 
disputed matter. A peculiarly active and 
acute observation taught him that many 
of these jarring families, especially those of 
the same blood, are par in the intellectual 
processes of perception and reflection ; that 
in the business of the visible working world 
they are confessedly by no means superior 
to one another; whereas in abstruse matters 
of mere Faith, not admitting direct and 



68 



NOTES 

sensual evidence, one in a hundred will 
claim to be right, and immodestly charge 
the other ninety-nine with being wrong. 

Thus he seeks to discover a system which 
will prove them all right, and all wrong; 
which will reconcile their differences; will 
unite past creeds; will account for the pres- 
ent, and will anticipate the future with a 
continuous and uninterrupted development; 
this, too, by a process, not negative and 
distinctive, but, on the contrary, intensely 
positive and constructive. I am not called 
upon to sit in the seat of judgment; but I 
may say that it would be singular if the 
attempt succeeded. Such a system would 
be all-comprehensive, because not limited by 
space, time, or race; its principle would be 
extensive as Matter itself, and, consequently, 
eternal. Meanwhile he satisfies himself, — 
the main point. 

Students of metaphysics have of late 
years defined the abuse of their science 
as "the morphology of common opinion." 
Contemporary investigators, they say, have 
been too much occupied with introspection ; 
their labours have become merely physio- 
logico-biographical, and they have greatly 
neglected the study of averages. For, says 
La Rochefoucauld, // est plus aise de connoitre 
i'homme on general que de connoitre un homme 



69 



NOTES 

en particulier ; and on so wide a subject all 
views must be one-sided. 

But this is not the fashion of Easterns. 
They have still to treat great questions ex 
analogia universi, instead of ex analogia 
hominis. They must learn the basis of 
sociology, the philosophic conviction that 
mankind should be studied, not as a con- 
geries of individuals, but as an organic 
whole. Hence the Zeitgeist, or historical 
evolution of the collective consciousness of 
the age, despises the obsolete opinion that 
Society, the State, is bound by the same 
moral duties as the simple citizen. Hence, 
too, it holds that the "spirit of man, being 
of equal and uniform substance, doth usually 
suppose and feign in nature a greater equality 
and uniformity than is in Truth." 

Christianity and Islamism have been on 
their trial for the last eighteen and twelve 
centuries. They have been ardent in pros- 
elytising, yet they embrace only one-tenth 
and one-twentieth of the human race. Haji 
Abdu would account for the tardy and unsat- 
isfactory progress of what their votaries call 
"pure truths," by the innate imperfections of 
the same. Both propose a reward for mere 
belief, and a penalty for simple unbelief; 
rewards and punishments being, by the way, 
very disproportionate. Thus they reduce 



70 



NOTES 

everything to the scale of a somewhat 
unrefined egotism; and their demoralising 
effects become clearer to every progressive 
age. 

Haji Abdu seeks Truth only, truth as far 
as man, in the present phase of his develop- 
ment, is able to comprehend it. He disdains 
to associate utility, like Bacon ( Nov. Org. I. 
Aph. 124), the High Priest of the English 
Creed, le gros bon sens, with the lumen siccum 
ac purum notionum verarum. He seems to 
see the injury inflicted upon the sum of 
thought by the a posteriori superstition, the 
worship of "facts," and the deification of 
synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way 
in which Locke "freed philosophy from the 
incubus of innate ideas." Like Luther and 
the leaders of the great French Revolution, 
he broke with the Past; and he threw over- 
board the whole cargo of human tradition. 
The result has been an immense movement 
of the mind which we love to call Progress, 
when it has often been retrograde; together 
with a mighty development of egotism 
resulting from the pampered sentiment of 
personality. 

The Haji regrets the excessive importance 
attached to a possible future state: he looks 
upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day 
dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder 



71 



NOTES 

waking life. The condition may appear 
humble and prosaic to those exalted by the 
fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking 
which, like the physical, is the pursuit of an 
ideal happiness. But he is too wise to 
affirm or to deny the existence of another 
world. For life beyond the grave there is no 
consensus of mankind, no Catholic opinion 
held, semper, et ubique, et ab omnibus. The 
intellectual faculties (perception and reflec- 
tion) are mute upon the subject: they bear 
no testimony to facts ; they show no proof. 
Even the instinctive sense of our kind is 
here dumb. We may believe what we are 
taught: we can know nothing. He would, 
therefore, cultivate that receptive mood 
which, marching under the shadow of mighty 
events, leads to the highest of goals, — the 
development of Humanity. With him sus- 
pension of judgment is a system. 

Man has done much during the sixty -eight 
centuries which represent his history. This 
assumes the first Egyptian Empire, following 
the pre-historic, to begin with b. c. 5000, 
and to end with b. c. 3249. It was the Old, 
as opposed to the Middle, the New, and the 
Low: it contained the Dynasties from I to 
X, and it was the age of the Pyramids, at 
once simple, solid, and grand. When the 
praiser of the Past contends that modern 



72 



civilisation has improved in nothing upon 
Homer and Herodotus, he is apt to forget 
that every schoolboy is a miracle of learning 
compared with the Cave-man and the palaeo- 
lithic race. And, as the Past has been, so 
shall the Future be. 

The Pilgrim's view of life is that of the 
Soofi, with the usual dash of Buddhistic 
pessimism. The profound sorrow of exist- 
ence, so often sung by the dreamy Eastern 
poet, has now passed into the practical 
European mind. Even the light Frenchman 
murmurs, — 

Moi, moi, chaque jour courbant plus bas ma tete 
Je passe — et refroidi sous ce soleil joyeux, 

Je m 'en irai beintot, au milieu de la fete, 

Sans que rien manque au monde immense et radieux. 

But our Haji is not Nihilistic in the "no- 
nothing" sense of Hood's poem, or, as the 
American phrases it, "There is nothing new, 
nothing true, and it don't signify." His is 
a healthy wail over the shortness, and the 
miseries of life, because he finds all created 
things — 

Measure the world, with " Me " immense. 

He reminds us of St. Augustine (Med. 
c. 21 ). "Vita haec, vita misera, vita caduca, 
vita incerta, vita laboriosa, vita immunda, 
vita domina malorum, regina superborum, 



73 



plena miseriis et erroribus . . . Quam 
humores tumidant, escae inflant, jejunia 
macerant, joci dissolvunt, tristitiae, consu- 
munt ; sollicitudo coarctat, securitas, hebetat, 
divitiae inflant et jactant. Paupertas dejicit, 
juventus extollit, senectus incurvat, impor- 
tunitas frangit maeror deprimit. Et his malis 
omnibus mors furibunda succedit." But for 
furibunda the Pilgrim would, perhaps, read 
benedicta. 

With Cardinal Newman, one of the glories 
of our age, Haji Abdvi finds "the Light of 
the world nothing else than the Prophet's 
scroll, full of lamentations and mourning 
and woe." I cannot refrain from quoting 
all this fine passage, if it be only for the 
sake pf its lame and shallow deduction. 
"To consider the world in its length and 
breadth, its various history and the many 
races of men, their starts, their fortunes, 
their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and 
then their ways, habits, governments, forms 
of worship; their enterprises, their aimless 
courses, their random achievements and 
acquirements, the impotent conclusion of 
long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and 
broken of a superintending design, the blind 
evolution (!) of what turn out to be great 
powers of truths, the progress of things as 
if from unreasoning elements, not towards 



74 



final causes; the greatness and littleness 
of man, his far-reaching aims and short 
duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, 
the disappointments of life, the defeat of 
good, the success of evil, physical pain, 
mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity 
of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corrup- 
tions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that 
condition of the whole race so fearfully yet 
exactly described in the Apostle's words,' hav- 
ing no hope and without God in the world' — 
all this is a vision to diffy and appal, and 
inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound 
mystery which is absolutely without human 
solution." Hence that admirable writer 
postulates some "terrible original calamity;" 
and thus the hateful doctrine, theologically 
called "original sin," becomes to him almost 
as certain as that "the world exists, and 
as the existence of God." Similarly the 
"Schedule of Doctrines" of the most liberal 
Christian Church insists upon human deprav- 
ity, and the "absolute need of the Holy 
Spirit's agency in man's regeneration and 
sanctification." 

But what have we here? The "original 
calamity" was either caused by God or 
arose without leave of God, in either case 
degrading God to man. It is the old 
dilemma whose horns are the irreconcilable 



75 



attributes of goodness and omniscience in 
the supposed Creator of sin and suffering. 
If the one quality be predicable, the other 
cannot be predicable of the same subject. 
Far better and wiser is the essayist's poetical 
explanation now apparently despised because 
it was the fashionable doctrine of the sage 
bard's day: — 

All nature is but art * * 

All discord harmony not understood ; 

All partial evil universal good. — ( Essay 289-292. ) 

The Pilgrim holds with St. Augustine Abso- 
lute Evil is impossible because it is always 
rising up into good. He considers the theory 
of a beneficent or maleficent deity a purely 
sentimental fancy, contradicted by human 
reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is 
often the active form of good; as F. W. 
Newman says, "so likewise is Evil the 
revelation of Good." With him all exist- 
ences are equal: so long as they possess the 
Hindu Agasa, Life-fluid or vital force, it 
matters not they be, — 

Fungus or oak or worm or man. 

War, he says, brings about countless individ- 
ual miseries, but it forwards general progress 
by raising the stronger upon the ruins of the 
weaker races. Earthquakes and cyclones 
ravage small areas; but the former builds 



76 



up earth for man's habitation, and the latter 
renders the atmosphere fit for him to breathe. 
Hence he echoes: 

— The universal Cause 
Acts not by partial but by general laws. 

Ancillary to the churchman's immoral view 
of "original sin" is the unscientific theory 
that evil came into the world with Adam 
and his seed. Let us ask what was the 
state of our globe in the pre-Adamite days 
when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge 
Saurians and other monsters lived in per- 
petual strife, in a destructiveness of which 
we have -now only the feeblest examples? 
What is the actual state of the world of 
waters, where the only object of life is death, 
where the Law of murder is the Law of 
Development? 

Some will charge the Haji with irrever- 
ence, and hold him a "lieutenant of Satan 
who sits in the chair of pestilence." But he 
is not intentionally irreverent. Like men of 
far higher strain, who deny divinely the 
divine, he speaks the things that others 
think and hide. With the author of " Super- 
natural Religion," he holds that we "gain 
infinitely more than we lose in abandoning 
belief in the reality of revelation;" and he 
looks forward to the day when "the old 



77 



NOTES 

tyranny shall have been broken, and when 
the anarchy of transition shall have passed 
away." But he is an Eastern. When he 
repeats the Greek's "Remember not to 
believe," he means Strive to learn, to know, 
for right ideas lead to right actions. Among 
the couplets not translated for this eclogue 
is: — 

Of all the safest ways of Life the safest way is still 

to doubt, 
Men win the future world with Faith, the present 

world they win without. 

This is the Spaniard's: — 

De las cosas mas seguras, mas seguro es duvidar ; 

a typically modern sentiment of the Brazen 
Age of Science following the Golden Age of 
Sentiment. But the Pilgrim continues: — 

The sages say : I tell thee no ! with equal faith all 

Faiths receive ; 
None more, none less, for Doubt is Death : they 

live the most who most believe. 

Here, again, is an oriental subtlety; a 
man who believes in everything equally and 
generally may be said to believe in nothing. 
It is not a simple European view which 
makes honest Doubt worth a dozen of the 
Creeds. And it is in direct opposition to 
the noted w T riter who holds that the man of 
simple faith is worth ninety-nine of those 



78 



who hold only to the egotistic interests of 
their own individuality. This dark saying 
means ( if it mean anything ), that the so-called 
moral faculties of man, fancy and ideality, 
must lord it over the perceptive and reflective 
powers, — a simple absurdity! It produced 
a Turricremata, alias Torquemada, who, 
shedding floods of honest tears, caused his 
victims to be burnt alive; and an Anchieta, 
the Thaumaturgist of Brazil, who beheaded 
a converted heretic lest the latter by lapse 
from grace lose his immortal soul. 

But this vein of speculation, which bigots 
brand as "Doubt, Denial, and Destruction;" 
this earnest religious scepticism ; this curious 
inquiry, "Has the universal tradition any 
base of fact?" ; this craving after the secrets 
and mysteries of the future, the unseen, the 
unknown, is common to all races and to 
every age. Even amongst the Romans, 
whose model man in Augustus' day was 
Horace, the philosophic, the epicurean, we 
find Propertius asking: — 

An ficta in miseras descendit fabula gentes 
Et timor haud ultra quam rogus esse potest ? 

To return : the Pilgrim's doctrines upon 
the subject of conscience and repentance 
will startle those who do not follow his train 
of thought: — 



79 



Never repent because thy will with will of Fate be 

not at one : 
Think, an thou please, before thou dost, but never 

rue the deed when done. 

This again is his modified fatalism. He 
would not accept the boisterous mode of 
cutting the Gordian-knot proposed by the 
noble British Philister — "we know we 're 
free and there 's an end on it!" He prefers 
Lamarck's, " The will is, in truth, never free." 
He believes man to be a co-ordinate term of 
Nature's great progression ; a result of the 
interaction of organism and environment, 
working through cosmic sections of time. 
He views the human machine, the pipe of 
flesh, as depending upon the physical theory 
of life. Every corporeal fact and phenom- 
enon, which, like the tree, grows from within 
or without, is a mere product of organisation ; 
living bodies being subject to the natural 
law governing the lifeless and the inorganic. 
Whilst the religionist assures us that man is 
not a mere toy of fate, but a free agent 
responsible to himself, with work to do and 
duties to perform, the Haji, with many 
modern schools, holds Mind to be a word 
describing a special operation of matter; the 
faculties generally to be manifestations of 
movements in the central nervous system; 
and every idea, even of the Deity, to be a 



80 



certain little pulsation of a certain little mass 
of animal pap, — the brain. Thus he would 
not object to relationship with a tailless 
catarrhine anthropoid ape, descended from a 
monad or a primal ascidian. 

Hence he virtually says, "I came into the 
world without having applied for or having 
obtained permission; nay, more, without my 
leave being asked or given. Here I find 
myself hand-tied by conditions, and fettered 
by laws and circumstances, in making which 
my voice had no part. While in the womb 
I was an automaton ; and death will find me 
a mere machine. Therefore not I, but the 
Law, or, if you please, the Lawgiver, is 
answerable for all my actions." Let me 
here observe that to the Western mind 
"Law" postulates a Lawgiver; not so to 
the Eastern, and especially to the Soofi, who 
holds these ideas to be human, unjustifiably 
extended to interpreting the non-human, 
which men call the Divine. 

Further he would say, " I am an individual 
(qui nil habet dividui), a circle touching and 
intersecting my neighbours at certain points, 
but nowhere corresponding, nowhere blend- 
ing. Physically I am not identical in all 
points with other men. Morally I differ 
from them : in nothing do the approaches of 
knowledge, my five organs of sense (with 



81 



NOTES 

their Shelleyan "interpenetration"), exactly 
resemble those of any other being. Ergo, 
the effect of the world, of life, of natural 
objects, will not in my case be the same as 
with the beings most resembling me. Thus 
I claim the right of creating or modifying 
for my own and private use, the system 
which most imports me ; and if the reasonable 
leave be refused to me, I take it without 
leave. 

"But my individuality, however all-suffi- 
cient for myself, is an infinitesimal point, an 
atom subject in all things to the Law of 
Storms called Life. I feel, I know that 
Fate is. But I cannot know what is or what 
is not fated to befall me. Therefore in the 
pursuit of perfection as an individual lies my 
highest, and indeed my only duty, the 'I' 
being duly blended with the ' We.' I object 
to be a 'self-less man,' which to me denotes 
an inverted moral sense. I am bound to 
take careful thought concerning the conse- 
quences of every word and deed. When, 
however, the Future has become the Past, 
it would be the merest vanity for me to 
grieve or to repent over that which was 
decreed by universal Law." 

The usual objection is that of man's 
practice. It says, "This is well in theory; 
but how carry it out? For instance, why 



82 



would you kill, or give over to be killed, the 
man compelled by Fate to kill your father?" 
Haji Abdu replies, "I do as others do, not 
because the murder was done by him, but 
because the murderer should not be allowed 
another chance of murdering. He is a tiger 
who has tasted blood and who should be 
shot. I am convinced that he was a tool in 
the hands of Fate, but that will not prevent 
my taking measures, whether predestined or 
not, in order to prevent his being similarly 
used again." 

As with repentance so with conscience. 
Conscience may be a "fear which is the 
shadow of j us tice ; " even as pity is the shadow 
of love. Though simply a geographical and 
chronological accident, which changes with 
every age of the world, it may deter men from 
seeking and securing the prize of successful 
villany. But this incentive to beneficence 
must be applied to actions that will be done, 
not to deeds that have been done. 

The Haji, moreover, carefully distinguishes 
between the working of fate under a personal 
God, and under the Reign of Law. In the 
former case the contradiction between the 
foreknowledge of a Creator, and the free-will 
of a Creature, is direct, palpable, absolute. 
We might as well talk of black-whiteness 
and of white-blackness. A hundred genera- 



83 



NOTES 

tions of divines have never been able to ree 
the riddle ; a million will fail. The difficulty 
is insurmountable to the Theist whose 
Almighty is perforce Omniscient, and as 
Omniscient, Prescient. But it disappears 
when we convert the Person into Law, or a 
settled order of events; subject, moreover, 
to certain exceptions fixed and immutable, 
but at present unknown to man. The differ- 
ence is essential as that between the penal 
code with its narrow forbiddal, and the broad 
commandment which is a guide rather than 
a task-master. 

Thus, too, the belief in fixed Law, versus 
arbitrary will, modifies the Haji's opinions 
concerning the pursuit of happiness. Man- 
kind, das rastlose Ursachenthier, is born to be 
on the whole equally happy and miserable. 
The highest organisms, the fine porcelain of 
our family, enjoy the most and suffer the 
most: they have a capacity for rising to 
the empyrean of pleasure and for plunging 
deep into the swift-flowing river of woe and 
pain. Thus Dante (Inf. vi. 106): 

— tua scienza 
Che vuol, quanto la cosa e piu perfetta 
Piu senta '1 bene, e cosi la doglienza. 

So Buddhism declares that existence in itself 
implies effort, pain and sorrow; and, the 



84 



higher the creature, the more it suffers. The 
common clay enjoys little and suffers little. 
Sum up the whole and distribute the mass: 
the result will be an average ; and the beggar 
is, on the whole, happy as the prince. Why, 
then, asks the objector, does man ever strive 
and struggle to change, to rise; a struggle 
which involves the idea of improving his 
condition? The Haji answers, "Because 
such is the Law under which man is born : it 
may be fierce as famine, cruel as the grave, 
but man must obey it with blind obedience." 
He does not enter into the question whether 
life is worth living, whether man should 
elect to be born. Yet his Eastern pessimism, 
which contrasts so sharply with the optimism 
of the West, re-echoes the lines: 

— a life, 
With large results so little rife, 
Though bearable seems hardly worth 
This pomp of words, this pain of birth. 

Life, whatever may be its consequence, is 
built upon a basis of sorrow. Literature, . 
the voice of humanity, and the verdict of 
mankind proclaim that all existence is a 
state of sadness. The "physicians of the 
Soul" would save her melancholy from 
degenerating into despair by doses of stead- 
fast belief in the presence of God, in the 
assurance of Immortality, and in visions of 



85 



NOTES 

the final victory of good. Were Haji Abdu 
a mere Theologist, he would add that Sin, 
not the possibility of revolt, but the revolt 
itself against conscience, is the primary form 
of evil, because it produces error, moral and 
intellectual. This man, who omits to read 
the Conscience-law, however it may differ 
from the Society-law, is guilty of negligence. 
That man, who obscures the light of Nature 
with sophistries, becomes incapable of dis- 
cerning his own truths. In both cases error, 
deliberately adopted, is succeeded by suffer- 
ing which, we are told, comes in justice and 
benevolence as a warning, a remedy, and a 
chastisement. 

But the Pilgrim is dissatisfied with the 
idea that evil originates in the individual 
actions of free agents, ourselves and others^ 
This doctrine fails to account for its char- 
acteristics, — essentiality and universality. 
That creatures endowed with the mere 
possibility of liberty should not always 
choose the Good appears natural. But that 
of the Milliards of human beings who have 
inhabited Earth, not one should have been 
found invariably to choose Good, proves 
how insufficient is the solution. Hence no 
one believes in the existence of the complete 
man under the present state of things. The 
Haji rejects all popular and mythical expla- 



86 



NOTES 

nation by the Fall of "Adam," the innate 
depravity of human nature, and the absolute 
perfection of certain Incarnations, which 
argues their divinity. He can only wail over 
the prevalence of evil, assume its foundation 
to be error, and purpose to abate it by 
uprooting that Ignorance which bears and 
feeds it. 

His "eschatology," like that of the Soofis 
generally, is vague and shadowy. He may 
lean towards the doctrine of Marc Aurelius, 
"The unripe grape, the ripe and the dried: 
all things are changes not into nothing, but 
into that which is not at present." This is 
one of the monstruosa opinionum portenta 
mentioned by the XlXth General Council, 
alias the First Council of the Vatican. But 
he only accepts it with a limitation. He 
cleaves to the ethical, not the intellectual, 
worship of " Nature," which moderns define 
to be an " unscientific and imaginary synonym 
for the sum total of observed phenomena." 
Consequently he holds to the "dark and 
degrading doctrines of the Materialist," the 
" Hylotheist : " in opposition to the spiritual- 
ist, a distinction far more marked in the 
West than in the East. Europe draws a 
hard, dry line between Spirit and Matter: 
Asia does not. 

Among us the Idealist objects to the 



87 



Materialists that the latter cannot agree 
upon fundamental points ; that they cannot 
define what is an atom; that they cannot 
account for the transformation of physical 
action and molecular motion into conscious- 
ness; and vice versa, that they cannot say 
what matter is; and, lastly, that Berkeley 
and his school have proved the existence of 
spirit while denying that of matter. 

The Materialists reply that the want of 
agreement shows only a study insufficiently 
advanced; that man cannot describe an 
atom, because he is still an infant in science, 
yet there is no reason why his mature man- 
hood should not pass through error and 
incapacity to truth and knowledge; that 
consciousness becomes a property of matter 
when certain conditions are present; that 
Hyle (1A77) or Matter may be provisionally 
defined as "phenomena with a substructure 
of their own, transcendental and eternal, 
subject to the action, direct or indirect, of 
the five senses, whilst its properties present 
themselves in three states, "the solid, the 
liquid, and the gaseous." To casuistical 
Berkeley they prefer the common sense of 
mankind. They ask the idealist and the 
spiritualist why they cannot find names for 
themselves without borrowing from a "dark 
and degraded " school ; why the former must 



88 



NOTES 

call himself after his eye (idein) ; the latter 
after his breath (spmtusj? Thus the Haji 
twits them with affixing their own limita- 
tions to their own Almighty Power, and, as 
Socrates said, with bringing down Heaven 
to the market-place. 

Modern thought tends more and more to 
reject crude idealism and to support the 
monistic theory, the double aspect, the trans- 
figured realism. It discusses the Nature of 
Things in Themselves. To the question, is 
there anything outside of us which corre- 
sponds with our sensations? that is to say, 
is the whole world simply " I," they reply 
that obviously there is a something else; 
and that this something else produces the 
brain-disturbance which is called sensation. 
Instinct orders us to do something; Reason 
(the balance of faculties) directs; and the 
strongest motive controls. Modern Science, 
by the discovery of Radiant Matter, a fourth 
condition, seems to conciliate the two schools. 
"La decouverte d'un quatrieme etat de la 
matiere," says a Reviewer, "c'est la porte 
ouverte a l'infini de ses transformations; 
c'est l'homme invisible et impalpable de 
meme possible sans cesser d'etre substantiel ; 
c'est le monde des esprits entrant sans 
absurdite dans la domain e des hypotheses 
scientifiques ; c'est la possibilite pour le 



89 



materialiste de croire a la vie d'outre tombe, 
sans renoncer au substratum materiel qu'il 
croit necessaire au maintien de l'individ- 
ualite." 

With Haji Abdu the soul is not material, 
for that would be a contradiction of terms. 
He regards it, with many moderns, as a 
state of things, not a thing; a convenient 
word denoting the sense of personality, of 
individual identity. In his ghostly significa- 
tion he discovers an artificial dogma which 
could hardly belong to the brutal savages of 
the Stone Age. He finds it in the funereal 
books of ancient Egypt, whence probably it 
passed to the Zendavesta and the Vedas. 
In the Hebrew Pentateuch, of which part is 
still attributed to Moses, it is unknown, or, 
rather, it is deliberately ignored by the author 
or authors. The early Christians could not 
agree upon the subject; Origen advocated 
the pre-existence of men's souls, supposing 
them to have been all created at one time 
and successively embodied. Others make 
Spirit born with the hour of birth : and so 
forth. 

But the brain-action, or, if you so phrase 
it, the mind, is not confined to the reasoning 
faculties; nor can we afford to ignore the 
sentiments, the affections which are, perhaps, 
the most potent realities of life. Their loud 



90 



NOTES 

affirmative voice contrasts strongly with the 
titubant accents of the intellect. They seem 
to demand a future life, even a state of 
rewards and punishments from the Maker of 
the world, the Ortolano Eterno, 1 the Potter 
of the East, the Watchmaker of the West. 
They protest against the idea of annihilation. 
They revolt at the notion of eternal parting 
from parents, kinsmen and friends. Yet the 
dogma of a future life is by no means catholic 
and universal. The Anglo-European race 
apparently cannot exist without it, and we 
have lately heard of the "Aryan Soul-land." 
On the other hand, many of the Buddhist and 
even the Brahman Schools preach Nirwana 
(comparative non-existence) and Parinirwana 
(absolute nothingness). Moreover, the great 
Turanian family, actually occupying all 
Eastern Asia, has ever ignored it; and the 
200,000,000 of Chinese Confucians, the mass 
of the nation, protest emphatically agaiflst 
the mainstay of the western creeds, because 
it "unfits men for the business and duty 
of life, by fixing their speculations on an 
unknown world." And even its votaries, in 



i The Eternal Gardener : so the old inscription 
saying : — 

locatus est in \ 
Homo ) damnatus est in f horto> 
humatus est in l 
renatus est in ) 



9' 



NOTES 

all ages, races and faiths, cannot deny that 
the next world is a copy, more or less 
idealised, of the present; and that it lacks 
a single particular savouring of originality. 
It is in fact a mere continuation; and the 
continuation is "not proven." 

It is most hard to be a man ; 

and the Pilgrim's sole consolation is in 
self-cultivation, and in the pleasures of the 
affections. This sympathy may be an 
indirect self-love, a reflection of the light of 
egotism: still it is so transferred as to imply a 
different system of convictions. It requires 
a different name: to call benevolence "self- 
love" is to make the fruit or flower not only 
depend upon a root for development ( which 
is true), but the very root itself (which is 
false). And, finally, his ideal is of the high- 
est: his praise is reserved for: 

— Lives 
Lived in obedience to the inner law 
Which cannot alter. 



Q2 



NOTE II 

A few words concerning the Kasidah 
itself. Our Haji begins with a mise- 
en-schie ; and takes leave of the Caravan 
setting out for Mecca. He sees the 
"Wolf's tail" ( Dum-i-gurg), the \vi<avyh, 
or wolf-gleam, the Diluculum, the Zodiacal 
dawn-light, the first faint brushes of white 
radiating from below the Eastern horizon. 
It is accompanied by the morning-breath 
(Dam-i-Stibh), the current of air, almost 
imperceptible except by the increase of cold, 
which Moslem physiologists suppose to be 
the early prayer offered by Nature to the 
First Cause. The Ghoul-i-Biyaban (Desert- 
Demon) is evidently the personification of 
man's fears and of the dangers that surround 
travelling in the wilds. The "wold-where- 
none-save-He (Allah) -can-dwell" is a great 
and terrible wilderness (Dasht-t-la-siwa Hu) ; 
and Allah's Holy Hill is Arafat, near Mecca, 
which the Caravan reaches after passing 
through Medina. The first section ends 
with a sore lament that the "meetings of 
this world take place upon the highway of 
Separation;" and the original also has: — 

The chill of sorrow numbs my thought : methinks 

I hear the passing knell ; 
As dies across yon thin blue line the tinkling of the 

Camel-bell. 



93 



NOTES 

The next section quotes the various 
aspects under which Life appeared to the 
wise and foolish teachers of humanity. 
First comes Hafiz, whose well-known lines 
are quoted beginning with Shab-i-tarik o 
bim-i-mauj , &c. Hur is the plural of Ahwar, 
in full Ahwar el-Ayn, a maid whose eyes 
are intensely white where they should be 
white, and black elsewhere: hence our silly 
" Houries." Follows Umar-i- Khayyam, who 
spiritualised Tasawwof, or Sooffeism, even 
as the Soofis (Gnostics) spiritualised Moslem 
Puritanism. The verses alluded to are: — 

You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse 
I made a second marriage in my house, 

Divorced old barren Reason from my bed 
And took the Daughter of the Vine to spouse. 

(St. 60, Mr. FitzGerald's translation.) 

Here "Wine" is used in its mystic sense 
of entranced Love for the Soul of Souls. 
Umar was hated and feared because he 
spoke boldly when his brethren the Soofis 
dealt in inuendoes. A third quotation 
has been trained into a likeness of the 
" Hymn of Life," despite the commonplace 
and the navrante vulgarite which charac- 
terise the pseudo-Schiller-Anglo-American 
School. The same has been done to the 
words of Isa (Jesus ) ; for the author, who is 
well-read in the Ingil (Evangel), evidently 



94 



NOTES 

intended the allusion. Mansur el-Hallaj 
( the Cotton-Cleaner) was stoned for crudely 
uttering the Pantheistic dogma Ana '/ Hakk 
(I am the Truth, i.e., God), wa laysa 
fi-jubbati il y Allah (and within my coat is 
nought but God.) His blood traced on the 
ground the first-quoted sentence. Lastly, 
there is a quotation from "Sardanapalus, 
son of Anacyndaraxes," &c. : here 7rcufe may 
mean sport; but the context determines the 
kind of sport intended. The Zahid is 
the literal believer in the letter of the Law, 
opposed to the Soofi, who believes in its 
spirit: hence the former is called a Zahiri 
(outsider), and the latter a Batini, an insider. 
Moses is quoted because he ignored future 
rewards and punishments. As regards the 
"two Eternities," Persian and Arab meta- 
physicians split Eternity, i.e., the negation 
of Time, into two halves, A^al (beginning- 
lessness) and Abad (endlessness) ; both being 
mere words, gatherings of letters with a 
subjective significance. In English we use 
"Eternal" {/Eviternus, age-long, life-long) 
as loosely, by applying it to three distinct 
ideas; (i) the habitual, in popular parlance; 
(2) the exempt from duration; and (3) the 
everlasting, which embraces all duration. 
"Omniscience-Maker" is the old Roman 
sceptic's Homo fecit Deos. 



95 



NOTES 

The next section is one long wail over the 
contradictions, the mysteries, the dark end, 
the infinite sorrowfulness of all existence, 
and the arcanum of grief which, Luther said, 
underlies all life. As with Euripides "to 
live is to die, to die is to live." Haji Abdu 
borrows the Hindu idea of the human body. 
"It is a mansion," says Menu, "with bones 
for its beams and rafters; with nerves and 
tendons for cords; with muscles and blood 
for cement; with skin for its outer covering; 
filled with no sweet perfume, but loaded 
with impurities; a mansion infested by age 
and sorrow; the seat of malady; harassed 
with pains; haunted with the quality of 
darkness (Tama-guna), and incapable of 
standing." The Pot and Potter began with 
the ancient Egyptians. " Sitting as a potter 
at the wheel, Cneph (at Phils) moulds clay, 
and gives the spirit of life to the nostrils 
of Osiris." Hence the Genesitic "breath." 
Then we meet him in the Vedas, the Being 
"by whom the fictile vase is formed; the 
clay out of which it is fabricated." We find 
him next in Jeremiah's "Arise and go down 
unto the Potter's house," &c. (xviii. 2), and 
lastly in Romans (ix. 20), "Hath not the 
potter power over the clay?" No wonder 
that the first Hand who moulded the man- 
mud is a lieu commun in Eastern thought. 



96 



NOTES 

The "waste of agony" is Buddhism, or 
Schopenhauerism pure and simple, I have 
moulded "Earth on Earth" upon "Seint 
Ysidre" 's well-known rhymes (a. d. 1440) : — 

Erthe out of Erthe is wondirli wrouzt, 

Erthe of Erthe hath gete a dignite of nouzt, 

Erthe upon Erthe hath sett all his thouzt 

How that Erthe upon Erthe may be his brouzt, &c. 

The "Camel-rider," suggests Ossian, "yet 
a few years and the blast of the desert 
comes." The dromedary was chosen as 
Death's vehicle by the Arabs, probably 
because it bears the Bedouin's corpse to the 
distant burial-ground, where he will lie 
among his kith and kin. The end of this 
section reminds us of: — 

How poor, how rich ; how abject, how august, 
How complicate, how wonderful is Man ! 

The Haji now passes to the results of his 
long and anxious thoughts: I have pur- 
posely twisted his exordium into an echo of 
Milton : — 

Till old experience doth attain 
To something of prophetic strain. 

He boldly declares that there is no God 
as man has created his Creator. Here he is 
at one with modern thought: — "En general 
les croyants font le Dieu comme ils sont 
eux-memes," (says J. J. Rousseau, "Con- 



97 



NOTES 

fessions," I. 6): "les bons le font bon: 
les mediants le font mediant: les devots 
haineux et bilieux, ne voient que l'enfer, 
parce qu'ils voudraient damner tout le 
monde; les ames aimantes et douces n'y 
croient guere; et Tun des etonnements dont 
je ne reviens pas est de voir le bon Fenelon 
en parler dans son Tdemaque comme s'il 
y croyoit tout de bon: mais j'espere qu'il 
mentoit alors; car enfin quelque veridique 
qu'on soit, il faut bien mentir quelquefois 
quand on est eveque." " Man depicts him- 
self in his gods," says Schiller. Hence the 
Naturgott, the deity of all ancient peoples, 
and with which every system began, allowed 
and approved of actions distinctly immoral, 
often diabolical. Belief became moralised 
only when the conscience of the community, 
and with it of the individual items, began 
aspiring to its golden age, — Perfection. 
"Dieu est le superlatif, dont le positif est 
l'homme," says Carl Vogt; meaning, that 
the popular idea of a numen is that of a mag- 
nified and non-natural man. 

He then quotes his authorities. Buddha, 
whom the Catholic Church converted to 
Saint Josaphat, refused to recognise Ishwara 
(the deity), on account of the mystery of 
the "cruelty of things." Schopenhauer, 
Miss Cobbe's model pessimist, who at the 



98 



NOTES 

humblest distance represents Buddha in the 
world of Western thought, found the vision 
of man's unhappiness, irrespective of his 
actions, so overpowering that he concluded 
the Supreme Will to be malevolent, "heart- 
less, cowardly, and arrogant." Confucius, 
the "Throneless king, more powerful than 
all kings," denied a personal deity. The 
Epicurean idea rules the China of the present 
day. "God is great, but He lives too far 
off," say the Turanian Santals in Aryan 
India; and this is the general language of 
man in the Turanian East. 

Haji Abdu evidently holds that idolatry 
begins with a personal deity. And let us 
note that the latter is deliberately denied by 
the " Thirty-nine Articles." With them God 
is "a Being without Parts (personality) or 
Passions." He professes a vague Agnosti- 
cism, and attributes popular faith to the 
fact that Timor fecit Deos; "every religion 
being, without exception, the child of fear 
and ignorance" (Carl Vogt). He now 
speaks as the "Drawer of the Wine," the 
"Ancient Taverner," the "Old Magus," 
the "Patron of the Mughan or Magians; 
all titles applied to the Sooh* as opposed 
to the Zahid. His "idols" are the eidola 
(illusions) of Bacon, "having their founda- 
tions in the very constitution of man," and 



99 



NOTES 

therefore appropriately called fabulce. That 
"Nature's Common Course" is subject to 
various interpretation, may be easily proved. 
Aristotle was as great a subverter as Alex- 
ander; but the quasi-prophetical Stagyrite 
of the Dark Ages, who ruled the world till 
the end of the thirteenth century, became 
the "twice execrable" of Martin Luther; 
and was finally abolished by Galileo and 
Newton. Here I have excised two stanzas. 
The first is: — 

Theories for truths, fable for fact ; system for 

science vex the thought 
Life's one great lesson you despise — to know that 

all we know is nought. 

This is in fact: — 

Well didst thou say, Athena's noblest son, 
The most we know is nothing can be known. 

The next is: — 

Essence and substance, sequence, cause, beginning, 
ending, space and time, 

These be the toys of manhood's mind, at once ridic- 
ulous and sublime. 

He is not the only one who so regards 
"bothering Time and Space." A late defi- 
nition of the "infinitely great," viz., that the 
idea arises from denying form to any figure ; 
of the "infinitely small," from refusing mag- 
nitude to any figure, is a fair specimen of 
the "dismal science" — metaphysics. 



ioo 



NOTES 

Another omitted stanza reads : 

How canst thou, Phenomen ! pretend the Noumenon 

to mete and span ? 
Say which were easier probed and proved, Absolute 

Being or mortal man ? 

One would think that he had read Kant 
on the "Knowable and the Unknowable," 
or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could 
"differentiate between the Finite and the 
Infinite." It is a commonplace of the age, 
in the West as well as the East, that Science 
is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach 
the Noumena, the things themselves. This 
is the scholastic realism, the "residuum of a 
bad metaphysic," which deforms the system 
of Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply 
means that there are, or can be conceived, 
things in themselves (i.e. unrelated to 
thought); that we know them to exist; and, 
at the same time, that we cannot know what 
they are. But who dares say "cannot"? 
Who can measure man's work when he 
shall be as superior to our present selves as 
we are to the Cave-man of past time? 

The "Chain of Universe" alludes to the 
Jain idea that the whole, consisting of 
intellectual as well as of natural principles, 
existed from all eternity; and that it has 
been subject to endless revolutions, whose 
causes are the inherent powers of nature, 



intellectual as well as physical, without 
the intervention of a deity. But the Poet 
ridicules the "non-human," i.e., the not- 
ourselves, the negation of ourselves and 
consequently a non-existence. Most East- 
erns confuse the contradictories, in which 
one term stands for something, and the 
other for nothing {e.g., ourselves and not 
ourselves), with the contraries {e.g., rich 
and not-rich =poor), in which both terms 
express a something. So the positive-nega- 
tive "infinite" is not the complement of 
"finite," but its negation. The Western 
man derides the process by making "not- 
horse " the complementary entity of " horse." 
The Pilgrim ends with the favourite Soofi 
tenet that the five ( six ? ) senses are the doors 
of all human knowledge, and that no form 
of man, incarnation of the deity, prophet, 
apostle or sage, has ever produced an idea 
not conceived within his brain by the sole 
operation of these vulgar material agents. 
Evidently he is neither spiritualist nor 
idealist. 

He then proceeds to show that man 
depicts himself in his God, and that " God is 
the racial expression ; " a pedagogue on the 
Nile, an abstraction in India, and an astrol- 
oger in Chaldaea; where Abraham, says 
Berosus ( josephus, Ant. I, 7, § 2, and II, 9, 



§ 2) was "skilful in the celestial science." 
He notices the Akarana-Zaman (endless 
Time) of the Guebres, and the working dual 
Hormuzd and Ahriman. He brands the God 
of the Hebrews with pugnacity and cruelty. 
He has heard of the beautiful creations of 
Greek fancy which, not attributing a moral 
nature to the deity, included Theology in 
Physics; and which, like Professor Tyndall, 
seemed to consider all matter everywhere 
alive. We have adopted a very different 
Unitarianism; Theology, with its one Crea- 
tor; Pantheism with its "one Spirit's plastic 
stress;" and Science with its one Energy. 
He is hard upon Christianity and its " trinal 
God": I have not softened his expression 
(\^»# = a riddle), although it may offend 
readers. There is nothing more enigmatical 
to the Moslem mind than Christian Trinita- 
rianism: all other objections they can get 
over, not this. Nor is he any lover of 
Islamism, which, like Christianity, has its 
ascetic Hebraism and its Hellenic hedonism ; 
with the world of thought moving between 
these two extremes. The former, defined as 
predominant or exclusive care for the practice 
of right, is represented by Semitic and Arab 
influence, Koranic and Hadisic. The latter, 
the religion of humanity, a passion for life 
and light, for culture and intelligence; for 



103 



art, poetry and science, is represented in 
Islamism by the fondly and impiously-cher- 
ished memory of the old Guebre kings and 
heroes, beauties, bards and sages. Hence 
the mention of Zal and his son Rostam; of 
Cyrus and of the Jam-i-Jamshid, which may 
be translated either grail (cup) or mirror: it 
showed the whole world within its rim; 
and hence it was called Jam-i-Jehan-numa 
(universe-exposing). The contemptuous 
expressions about the diet of camel's milk 
and the meat of the Susmar, or green lizard, 
are evidently quoted from Firdausi's famous 
lines beginning: — 

Arab-ra be-jai rasid'est kar. 

The Haji is severe upon those who make 
of the Deity a Khwan-i-yaghma (or tray of 
plunder) as the Persians phrase it. He 
looks upon the shepherds as men, 
— Who rob the sheep themselves to clothe. 

So Schopenhauer (Leben, &c. by Wilhelm 
Gewinner) furiously shows how the " English 
nation ought to treat that set of hypocrites, 
impostors and money-graspers, the clergy, 
that annually devours .£3,500,000." 

The Haji broadly asserts that there is no 
Good and no Evil in the absolute sense as 
man has made them. Here he is one with 
Pope: — 



104 



NOTES 

And spite of pride, in erring nature's spite 
One truth is clear — whatever is, is right. 

Unfortunately the converse is just as true: — 
whatever is, is wrong. Khizr is the Elijah 
who puzzled Milman. He represents the 
Soofi, the Batini, while Musa (Moses) is the 
Zahid, the Zahiri; and the strange adven- 
tures of the twain, invented by the Jews, 
have been appropriated by the Moslems. 
He derides the Freewill of man; and, like 
Diderot, he detects "pantaloon in a prelate, 
a satyr in a president, a pig in a priest, an 
ostrich in a minister, and a goose in a chief 
clerk." He holds to Fortune, the Ti^x^ of 
Alcman, which is, Evvo/xlas re ical Heidovs 
d5e\0<x, Kal Ilpofiadelas dvydrrip, — Chance, 
the sister of Order and Trust, and the 
daughter of Forethought. The Scandina- 
vian Spinners of Fate were Urd (the Was, 
the Past), Verdandi (the Becoming, or 
Present), and Skuld (the To-be, or Future). 
He alludes to Plato, who made the Demi- 
ourgos create the worlds by the Logos ( the 
Hebrew Dabar) or Creative Word, through 
the iEons. These Aiwues of the Mystics 
were spiritual emanations from Atc6u, lit. a 
wave of influx, an age, period, or day; hence 
the Latin cevum, and the Welsh Awen, the 
stream of inspiration falling upon a bard. 
Basilides, the Egypto-Christian, made the 



io5 



Creator evolve seven ^Eons or Pteromata 
(fulnesses); from two of whom, Wisdom 
and Power, proceeded the 365 degrees of 
Angels. All were subject to a Prince of 
Heaven, called Abraxas, who was himself 
under guidance of the chief ^Eon, Wisdom. 
Others represent the first Cause to have 
produced an iion or Pure Intelligence; the 
first a second, and so forth till the tenth. 
This was material enough to affect Hyle, 
which thereby assumed a spiritual form. 
Thus the two incompatibles combined in 
the Scheme of Creation. 

He denies the three ages of the Buddhists : 
the wholly happy; the happy mixed with 
misery, and the miserable tinged with hap- 
piness, — the present. The Zoroastrians 
had four, each of 3,000 years. In the first, 
Hormuzd, the good-god, ruled alone; then 
Ahriman, the bad-god, began to work sub- 
serviently: in the third both ruled equally; 
and in the last, now current, Ahriman has 
gained the day. 

Against the popular idea that man has 
caused the misery of this world, he cites the 
ages, when the Old Red Sandstone bred 
gigantic cannibal fishes; when the Oolites 
produced the mighty reptile tyrants of air, 
earth, and sea; and when the monsters of 
the Eocene and Miocene periods shook the 



106 



NOTES 

ground with their ponderous tread. And 
the world of waters is still a hideous scene 
of cruelty, carnage, and destruction. 

He declares Conscience to be a geograph- 
ical and chronological accident. Thus he 
answers the modern philosopher whose soul 
was overwhelmed by the marvel and the awe 
of two things, "the starry heaven above 
and the moral law within." He makes the 
latter sense a development of the gregarious 
and social instincts; and so travellers have 
observed that the moral is the last step in 
mental progress. His Moors are the sav- 
age Dankali and other negroid tribes, who 
offer a cup of milk with one hand and stab 
with the other. He translates literally the 
Indian word Hathi (an elephant), the animal 
with the Hath (hand, or trunk). Finally 
he alludes to the age of active volcanoes, 
the present, which is merely temporary, the 
shifting of the Pole, and the spectacle to be 
seen from Mushtari, or the planet Jupiter. 

The Haji again asks the old, old question, 
What is Truth ? And he answers himself, 
after the fashion of the wise Emperor of 
China, "Truth hath not an unchanging 
name." A modern English writer says: "I 
have long been convinced by the experience 
of my life, as a pioneer of various heterodoxies 
which are rapidly becoming orthodoxies, that 



107 



nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or 
given in the affections and intuitions; and 
that discussion and inquiry do little more 
than feed temperament." Our poet seems 
to mean that the Perceptions, when they 
perceive truly, convey objective truth, which 
is universal ; whereas the Reflectives and the 
Sentiments, the working of the moral region, 
or the middle lobe of the phrenologists, 
supplies only subjective truth, personal and 
individual. Thus to one man the axiom, 
Opes trritamenta malorum, represents a 
distinct fact; while another holds wealth to 
be an incentive for good. Evidently both 
are right, according to their lights. 

Haji Abdu cites Plato and Aristotle, as 
usual with Eastern songsters, who delight in 
Mantik (logic). Here he appears to mean 
that a false proposition is as real a proposi- 
tion as one that is true. "Faith moves 
mountains" and "Manet immota fides" are 
evidently quotations. He derides the teach- 
ing of the "First Council of the Vatican" 
(cap. v.), "all the faithful are little children 
listening to the voice of St. Peter," who is 
the "Prince of the Apostles." He glances 
at the fancy of certain modern physicists, 
"devotion is a definite molecular change in 
the convolution of grey pulp." He notices 
with contumely the riddle of which Milton 



1 08 



NOTES 

speaks so glibly, where the Dialoguists, 

— reasoned high 
Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, 
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute. 

In opposition to the orthodox Moham- 
medan tenets which make Man's soul his 
percipient Ego, an entity, a unity, the Soofi 
considers it a fancy, opposed to body, which 
is a fact; at most a state of things, not a 
thing; a consensus of faculties whereof our 
frames are but the phenomena. This is not 
contrary to Genesitic legend. The Hebrew 
Ruach and Arabic Ruh, now perverted to 
mean soul or spirit, simply signify wind or 
breath, the outward and visible sign of life. 
Their later schools are even more explicit: 
"For that which befalls man befalls beasts; 
as the one dies, so does the other; they have 
all one death ; all go unto one place " ( Eccles. 
iii. 19). But the modern soul, a nothing, a 
string of negations, a negative in chief, 
is thus described in the Mahabharat: "It is 
indivisible, inconceivable, inconceptible : it 
is eternal, universal, permanent, immovable: 
it is invisible and unalterable." Hence the 
modern spiritualism which, rejecting materi- 
alism, can use only material language. 

These, says the Haji, are mere sounds. 
He would not assert " Verba gignunt verba," 



109 



but " Verba gignunt res," a step further. 
The idea is Bacon's "idola fori, omnium 
molestissima," the twofold illusions of lan- 
guage ; either the names of things that have 
no existence in fact, or the names of things 
whose idea is confused and ill-defined. 

He derives the Soul-idea from the "savage 
ghost" which Dr. Johnson defined to be a 
" kind of shadowy being." He j ustly remarks 
that it arose (perhaps) in Egypt; and was 
not invented by the "People of the Book." 
By this term Moslems denote Jews and 
Christians who have a recognised revelation, 
while their ignorance refuses it to Guebres, 
Hindus, and Confucians. 

He evidently holds to the doctrine of 
progress. With him protoplasm is the 
Yliastron, the Prima Materies. Our word 
matter is derived from the Sanskrit tfTTT 
(matra), which, however, signifies properly 
the invisible type of visible matter; in mod- 
ern language, the substance distinct from the 
sum of its physical and chemical properties- 
Thus, Matra exists only in thought, and is not 
recognisable by the action of the five senses. 
His "Chain of Being" reminds us of Prof. 
Huxley's Pedigree of the Horse, Orohippus, 
Mesohippus, Meiohippus, Protohippus, Pleio- 
hippus, and Equus. He has evidently heard 
of modern biology, or Hylozoism, which holds 



NOTES 

its quarter-million species of living beings, 
animal and vegetable, to be progressive 
modifications of one great fundamental unity, 
an unity of so-called "mental faculties" as 
well as of bodily structure. And this is the 
jelly-speck. He scoffs at the popular idea 
that man is the great central figure round 
which all things gyrate like marionettes ; in 
fact, the anthropocentric era of Draper, 
which, strange to say, lives by the side of 
the telescope and the microscope. As man 
is of recent origin, and may end at an early 
epoch of the macrocosm, so before his birth 
all things revolved round nothing, and may 
continue to do so after his death. 

The Haji, who elsewhere denounces " com- 
pound ignorance," holds that all evil comes 
from error; and that all knowledge has 
been developed by overthrowing error, the 
ordinary channel of human thought. He 
ends this section with a great truth. There 
are things which human Reason or Instinct 
matured, in its undeveloped state, cannot 
master; but Reason is a Law to itself. 
Therefore we are not bound to believe, or 
to attempt belief in, any thing which is con- 
trary or contradictory to Reason. Here he 
is diametrically opposed to Rome, who says, 
"Do not appeal to History; that is private 
judgment. Do not appeal to Holy Writ; 



that is heresy. Do not appeal to Reason; 
that is Rationalism." 

He holds with the Patriarchs of Hebrew 
Holy Writ, that the present life is all suffi- 
cient for an intellectual (not a sentimental) 
being; and, therefore, that there is no want 
of a Heaven or a Hell. With far more 
contradiction the Western poet sings: — 

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed 
In one self-place ; but when we are in hell, 
And where hell is there must we ever be, 
And, to be short, when all this world dissolves, 
And every creature shall be purified, 
All places shall be hell which are not heaven. 

For what want is there of a Hell when all 
are pure? He enlarges upon the ancient 
Buddhist theory, that Happiness and Misery 
are equally distributed among men and 
beasts; some enjoy much and suffer much; 
others the reverse. Hence Diderot declares, 
" Sober passions produce only the common- 
place . . . the man of moderate passion 
lives and dies like a brute." And again we 
have the half-truth : — 

That the mark of rank in nature 
Is capacity for pain. 

The latter implies an equal capacity for 
pleasure, and thus the balance is kept. 



Haji Abdu then proceeds to show that 
Faith is an accident of birth. One of his 
omitted distichs says: — 

Race makes religion ; true ! but aye upon the Maker 

acts the made, 
A finite God, an infinite sin, in lieu of raising man, 

degrade. 

In a manner of dialogue he introduces the 
various races each fighting to establish its 
own belief. The Frank (Christian) abuses 
the Hindu, who retorts that he is of 
Mlenchha, mixed or impure, blood, a term 
applied to all non-Hindus. The same is 
done by Nazarene and Mohammedan; by 
the Confucian, who believes in nothing, and 
by the Soofi, who naturally has the last 
word. The association of the Virgin Mary 
and Saint Joseph with the Trinity, in the 
Roman and Greek Churches, makes many 
Moslems conclude that Christians believe 
not in three but in five Persons. So an 
Englishman writes of the early Fathers, 
"They not only said that 3 = 1, and that 
1=3: they professed to explain how that 
curious arithmetical combination had been 
brought about. The Indivisible had been 
divided, and yet was not divided: it was 
divisible, and yet it was indivisible; black 
was white, and white was black ; and yet 
there were not two colours but one colour; 



"3 



NOTES 

and whoever did not believe it would be 
damned." The Arab quotation runs in the 
original : — 

Ahsanu 'I- Makdni /' il- Fata 'l-Jebannamu 
The best of places for (the generous) youth is 
Gehenna : 

Gehenna, alias Jahim, being the fiery place 
of eternal punishment. And the second 
saying Al- nar wa la 'l-Ar — "Fire (of 
Hell) rather than Shame," — is equally con- 
demned by the Koranist. The Gustakhi 
(insolence) of Fate is the expression of 
U mar- i- Khayyam (St. xxx): — 

What, without asking hither hurried whence ? 
And, without asking whither hurried hence ! 

Oh many a cup of this forbidden wine 
Must drown the memory of that insolence. 

Soofistically, the word means "the coquetry 
of the beloved one," the divinae particula 
aurae. And the section ends with Pope's: — 

He can't be wrong whose life is in the right. 



1 4 



CONCLUSION 

Here the Haji ends his practical study 
of mankind. The image of Destiny 
playing with men as pieces is a view common 
amongst Easterns. His idea of wisdom is 
once more Pope's: — 

And all our knowledge is ourselves to know. 

( Essay IV. 398. ) 

Regret, i.e. repentance, was one of the 
forty-two deadly sins of the Ancient Egyp- 
tians. " Thou shalt not consume thy heart," 
says the Ritual of the Dead, the negative 
justification of the soul or ghost ( Lepsius 
"Alteste Texte des Todtenbuchs"). We 
have borrowed competitive examination 
from the Chinese ; and, in these morbid days 
of weak introspection and retrospection, we 
might learn wisdom from the sturdy old 
Khemites. When he sings "Abjure the 
Why and seek the How," he refers to the 
old Scholastic difference of the Demonstratio 
propter quid (why is a thing?), as opposed 
to Demonstratio quia (i.e. that a thing is). 
The "great Man" shall end with becoming 
deathless, as Shakespeare says in his noble 
sonnet: — 

And Death once dead, there 's no more dying then ! 
"5 



NOTES 

Like the great Pagans, the Haji holds 
that man was born good, while the Christian 
" tormented by the things divine," cleaves to 
the comforting doctrine of innate sinfulness. 
Hence the universal tenet, that men should 
do good in order to gain by it here or here- 
after; the "enlightened selfishness," that 
says, Act well and get compound interest in 
a future state. The allusion to the "Theist- 
word" apparently means that the votaries 
of a personal Deity must believe in the 
absolute foreknowledge of the Omniscient 
in particulars as in generals. The Rule of 
Law emancipates man; and its exceptions 
are the gaps left by his ignorance. The wail 
over the fallen flower, &c, reminds us of 
the Pulambal ( Lamentations ) of the Anti- 
Brahminical writer, " Pathira-Giriyar." The 
allusion to Maya is from Das Kabir: — 

MSya mare, na man mare, mar mar gaya sarir. 
Illusion dies, the mind dies not though dead and 
gone the flesh. 

Nirwana, I have said, is partial extinction 
by being merged in the Supreme, not to be 
confounded with Pari-nirwana or absolute 
annihilation. In the former also, dying 
gives birth to a new being, the embodiment 
of karma ( deeds ), good and evil, done in the 
countless ages of transmigration. 

116 



NOTES 

Here ends my share of the work. On the 
whole it has been considerable. I have 
omitted, as has been seen, sundry stanzas, 
and I have changed the order of others. 
The text has nowhere been translated 
verbatim; in fact, a familiar European turn 
has been given to many sentiments which 
were judged too Oriental. As . the metre 
adopted by Haji Abdu was the Bahr Tawtl 
(long verse), I thought it advisable to pre- 
serve that peculiarity, and to fringe it with 
the rough, unobtrusive rhyme of the original. 

Vive valequel 





BIBLIOGRAPHY 





BIBLIOGRAPHY 



English Editions 

I. TheKasidah | (couplets) | ofHajiAbdu 
El-Yezdi | A Lay of the Higher Law | 
Translated and Annotated | by | His 
Friend and Pupil | F. B. | London | 
Bernard Quaritch, 15 Piccadilly. | 1880. 
Quarto, Yellow wrapper, Pp. iv 4-1-34. 

A few copies were printed without the name of 
Quaritch on title-page, viz. : London : Privately 
Printed, [n. d.], which Burton used for presenta- 
tion purposes. Under date of July 19, 1905, Mr. 
Quaritch's successor writes : 

" Of the 1880 edition only 60 copies or so were 
sold in the course of six or seven years and the 
remaining copies were returned to Burton." 

The entire edition did not exceed 250 copies 
both with and without Quaritch's imprint. 

II. Besides the princeps the text and notes 
of The Kasidah were printed by Lady 
Burton in her Life of Sir Richard F. 
Burton. Octavo, 2 vols. London, 1893. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

III. The Kasidah | (couplets) | of Haji 
Abdu Al-Yazdi | A Lay of the Higher 
Law | Translated and Annotated by his 
Friend and Pupil, F.B. | By | Captain Sir 
Richard F. Burton | K. C. M. G., F. R. 
G. S., &c, &c, &c. | London | H. S. 
Nichols and Co. | 3 Soho Square London 

W I MDCCCXCIIII 

Quarto, Cloth, Pp. [leaves] xvi+1-43. 
[100 numbered copies only.] 

IV. The Kasidah | (couplets) | of Haji 
Abdu Al-Yazdi | A Lay of the Higher 
Law I Translated and Annotated by his 
Friend and Pupil, F. B. | By | Captain 
Sir Richard F. Burton | K. C. M. G., 
F. R. G. S., &c, &c, &c. I London | 
H. J. Cook I 21 Golden Square W | 

MDCCC I 

Quarto, Cloth, Pp. [leaves] xvi+1-42. 
[250 numbered copies.] 



None of these editions number the sections or 
the couplets, and in editions III and IV the spell- 
ing, upon whose authority we know not, is altered 
from "El-Yezdi" to "Al-Yazdi." A more sur- 
prising variant is the "lifting" entire of a 
descriptive note written and printed by Mr. Mosher 
in his List of Books for 1896, and used by Mr. Cook 
in edition IV as his own " Publisher's Note " 
under date of April 27th, 1900. 

122 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

V. The Kasidah | of Haji Abdu El Yezdi | 
A Lay of the Higher Law | By | Sir 
Richard F. Burton | K. C. M. G. | With 
a Foreword | by | Roger Ingpen | Lon- 
don | Hutchinson & Co. Paternoster 
Row | 1914. 

Fcap octavo. Japan vellum bds. Pp. 
xviii-}-i-ii2. A few large paper copies 
[numbered] were also issued. 

A very palpable attempt to imitate the Old 
World format, including the numbering of both 
sections and couplets, first adopted by Mr. Mosher 
in 1896, with the customary British inability to 
acknowledge the "conveyance ! " 



II 

American Editions 

VI. The Old World Editions: 

The Kasidah of Haji | Abdu El- 
Yezdi I Translated and Anno-tated by 
his Friend | and Pupil, F. B. [Device] | 
Portland, Maine | Thomas B. Mosher, | 
mdcccxcvi. 

1. Narrow Fcap octavo (3^x7) vellum bds. Pp. 
xvi-j- 1— 100. (925 copies on Van Gelder paper, and 
100 on Japan vellum.) 

2. The same. Second edition. mdcccxcviii. 
(925 copies on Van Gelder paper, and 50 on Japan 
vellum.) 



123 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

3. The same. Third edition, mdcccc. The 
Notes are printed in larger type the same as in 
the text of the poem. Pp. xvi-|-i — 124. (925 
copies on Van Gelder paper, and 100 on Japan 
vellum.) 

4. The same. Fourth edition, mdcccciii. Pp. 
vxi-j-i — 124. (925 copies on Van Gelder paper.) 

5. The same. Fifth edition, mdccccvi. Pp. 
xvi-f-i — 126. (925 copies on Van Gelder paper.) 

6. The same. Sixth edition, mdccccviii. Pp. 
xvi-J-i — 126. (925 copies on Van Gelder paper, 
and 50 on Japan vellum.) 

7. The same. Seventh edition, mdccccix. Pp. 
xvi-f"i — 126. (925 copies on Van Gelder paper.) 

8. The same. Eighth edition, mdccccxi. Pp. 
xvi-j-i — 124. (925 copies on Van Gelder paper, 
and 50 on Japan vellum.) With frontispiece 
portrait from the etching by Flameng. 

9. The same. Ninth edition, mdccccxiii. Pp. 
xvi-|-i — 124. (925 copies on Van Gelder paper.) 
With frontispiece portrait from the etching by 
Flameng. 

10. The same. Tenth edition, mdccccxvii. Pp. 
xvi-}-i — 126. (925 copies on Van Gelder paper, 
and 50 on Japan vellum.) With frontispiece por- 
trait from the etching by Flameng. 

11. The same. Eleventh edition, mdccccxx. Pp. 
xvi-j-i — 126. (925 copies on Van Gelder paper.) 
With photogravure frontispiece portrait from the 
etching by Flameng. 

VII. Sir Richard F Burton | The Kasi- 
dah I Portland Maine | Thomas B 
Mosher | mdccccv. 

125 numbered copies on Van* Gelder hand-made 
paper; 15 copies on Japan vellum, numbered and 
signed, and 5 copies on pure vellum printed for spe- 



124 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

rial subscribers; also 10 copies with "Privately 
Printed " imprint for England. 
Royal quarto. [10 x 13] Half vellum bds. Pp. 
[leaves] viii-j-i— 56. This volume is set in 14-point 
old-style Roman type, each couplet in unbroken 
lines across the page. Printed on right hand side 
of the leaf only. The frontispiece is a Bierstadt 
reproduction of the etching by Leopold Flameng 
after Lord Leighton's portrait, the exact size of 
the original plate, 7 x 8% inches. 



VIII. The Kasidah | of Haji Abdu El- 
Yezdi I Translated and Annotated | by 
His Friend and Pupil, F. B. | Sir 
Richard F. Burton, K. C. B. | [Device] | 
Portland Maine | Thomas Bird Mosher | 

MDCCCCXV. 

Medium quarto. [9% x 12^]. Half 
vellum bds. Pp. xxviii-j-i — 74. 250 
copies on Van Gelder hand-made paper; 
also 20 copies on Japan vellum, numbered 
and signed. 

This volume is set in 12- and 14-point old-style 
Roman type, each couplet in unbroken lines across 
the page, and follows the arrangement, with addi- 
tional matter and facsimiles of my First Quarto 
edition of 1905. With Flameng portrait on Japan 
vellum, size of original etching, 7 x 8% inches. 
The facsimiles given are those of the wrapper 
design and title-page of the First edition (Quaritch, 
1880.) 




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